YouTube Kids: Troubling Trends & Who to Follow
Article by Caitlin Curbello
It’s around during every car ride. It’s around while sitting in any waiting room. It’s around while wheeling around the grocery store. It’s something that captures the attention of many adults, and serves as a temporary pacifier for many children today – it’s YouTube.
YouTube is a powerful video-centric platform created for the purposes of freedom of expression, information, opportunity, and the freedom to belong to online communities whom share similar interests. Sounds terrific, right? Unfortunately, there is a dark side to YouTube, too.
Since smartphones arrived on the scene, they inevitably fell into the hands of fussy or bored children to pacify any fits that might bubble to the surface. With endless options for entertainment via smartphones (music, games, educational tools, etc.), YouTube seems to rise above the rest.
YouTube is a vast depository for videos ranging in content from kids shows and beauty tutorials, to video game streaming and lifestyle blogs (to name a fraction of the content). It’s difficult for a parent to REALLY monitor everything their kids watch on YouTube, even with hefty parental controls in place. Many kids are likely tech-savvy enough to navigate past these safeguards if they really wanted to. YouTube recognized this, and created a sister application named YouTube Kids to help keep kids safe from inappropriate content. Problem solved – or is it?
Here, we want to showcase kid-friendly YouTubers to follow, but also shed some light on a terrible trend that’s popped up all over YouTube (YouTube Kids, especially). There have been more occurrences of kids stumbling upon channels or videos that are disguised as popular cartoon characters, but actually contain dark, disturbing, and completely inappropriate content for kids. Even within the YouTube Kids app, suggested videos pop-up with similar keyword tags after watching a specific video that resemble their favorites (Peppa Pig, Elsa from Disney’s Frozen, the Minions franchise, Doc McStuffins, etc.) but in reality, they are inappropriate parody videos. Many of these videos are clearly meant for mature audiences, but a three-year-old wouldn’t be able to know that.
YouTube Kids was created for the sole purpose of more heavily filtering out inappropriate content for kids and creating a safe online environment, but in a statement from YouTube to BBC Trending on March 27, 2017 they caution, “no filter is 100% accurate.”
The videos that sneak past YouTube Kids filters appear harmless based on the thumbnails and misleading titles that show up in the suggested video queue. Here is an example of a negative experience with these misleading videos, according to an online article written by Anisa Subedar and Will Yates on March 27, 2017 on the BBC website.
Laura June thought her three-year-old daughter was watching a Peppa Pig video, but after pressing play on this particular video, “the plot turns dark. A dentist with a huge syringe appears. Peppa’s teeth get pulled out. Distressed crying can be heard on the soundtrack.” June described the video as containing a lot of screaming and a sadistic dentist, the animation looking close enough to the real Peppa Pig that her three-year-old couldn’t tell the difference.
According to a separate blog post by Laura June, March 16, 2017, on theoutline.com, “ … though I wasn’t always standing over her shoulder watching with her, I am hyper-aware of what she’s doing, because YouTube is a hellworld.” June’s blog post continues describing a “knock-off” version of another of her daughter’s favorite shows, Doc McStuffins.
“And knock-off Doc McStuffins, which my daughter also accidentally browsed to just days ago, is scary too. Kids wet the bed and scream at their parents. It’s loud. Everyone cries. All of the audio seems like it’s chopped up from random sources. On the actual Disney show Doc McStuffins, the ailments are all made up — ‘you’ve got sticky-icky-itis, you need a bath!’ On faux McStuffins, people break legs. Bones get exposed. It’s terrifying.”
June believes that these videos are created specifically to confuse children because, “… they’re just slightly twisted enough … ” She also says, “this is not like a video of an animated Peppa Pig getting high with Snoop Dogg (that is also available) made for adults to laugh at. These videos are meant for kids … ”
For more information about how YouTube Kids works, and how to manage YouTube Kids for your children’s safety, please visit www.youtube.com/yt/kids/.
YouTube is an incredible invention that allows you to learn how to do things like change a tire, use sophisticated computer programs, how to make that avocado macaroni salad you’ve scrolled past on Facebook a million times – step-by-step – and so much more. It’s endless visual entertainment and information. It has even become a place to build a career. However, parent’s must closely monitor what children are watching at all times because – as with everything in life – with the good, comes the bad.
We’ve done some digging and found several YouTube channels that are appropriate for younger audiences. Please note, many of these YouTube channels vary by exact age-appropriateness, and we’ve included a rating here so that parents can decide what level of content is okay for their own children. We repeat, please watch these channels yourself before you allow your own children to – everyone has a different standard of what is appropriate.
YouTube is an incredible platform and has something for everyone! There are hundreds of thousands of YouTube channels out there, so please be aware of what your children are watching. For more information about YouTube, YouTube Kids, and online safety, please visit the following sites: