Something is wrong on the internet
An article has been trending of late on the net, with this same title. Long story short, it highlights how some disturbing and potentially traumatising videos have slipped into kids youtube videos, amounting to a form of child abuse.
While there have been heated debates, with some also questioning how it crosses over into the ‘disturbing’ category, it has nevertheless left me worried for the past week. These are traumatising & I couldn’t get over some of them.
Some of the videos from the article that bothered me were weird, or had gore/graphic content, had psychedelic/depressing sounds, or a combination of these (sorry, no links here — check article). From dubious handles, they get over the Youtube filtering algorithms & are promptly served in ‘up-next’ feeds.
The motive seems to be to get views and ad marketing dollars. By tricking kids into clicking videos with colourful thumbnails of the innocuous ‘Peppa Pig’ or ‘Mickey mouse’, these long videos then use the disturbing ploys to keep the short-attention-span kids puzzled, but glued.
Unsuccessful control measures at home
My kids have their iPad (and Youtube) time an hour most days. While we’ve been scrutinising the apps/content & checking history to avoid channels and genres, this kind of content is undetectable & may go completely unnoticed.
I removed Youtube app the very next day after reading this and raised control by playing videos only from the official channel websites. While this seemed to work, the kids soon started looking out for more.
To my utter dismay, I found my 2.5 year old daughter go back to watching random Peppa Pig youtube videos on a browser. Later, I realized that she had learnt to do voice search on Google & the basic keywords got her around.
Changing settings and disabling stuff on the browser didn’t help much though, when I later found my 5.5 year old son asking deeper questions to Google and Siri, such as “Where can I find Youtube”, “Why are videos not loading on my iPad?” and so on.
Thankfully, the deeper questions aren’t giving the best of responses, atleast not yet. Nevertheless, I often have to turn Wifi off, or Airplane mode on. But his probing questions continue, “How can I fix the problem with internet?” Not long before they get over this learning curve or smarter assistants arrive.
Clamp down on access?
On a more serious note, this is a real problem, one of the many with the internet as it operates today. Given the scale, policing by providers like Youtube doesn’t look an effective solution, while people will find ways to trick algorithms for the financial gains. Stepping up restrictions & stopping access to all unmoderated content may be the only step, atleast for now.
