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posted by
Fnord666
on Tuesday February 26 2019, @05:31PM
from the serious-mental-health-issues dept.
from the serious-mental-health-issues dept.
Tips for committing suicide are appearing in children's cartoons on YouTube and the YouTube Kids app.
YouTube Kids is theoretically a curated collection of videos that are safe for kids. Apparently, someone forgot to tell YouTube/Google that. Sure, YouTube probably has some butt covering clause in their EULA. That doesn't excuse such an oversight, though. It's very easy to see overworked, stressed parents, giving their kids access to YouTube/YouTube Kids. Kids have enough to deal with, without having to deal with grown-ups twisted thoughts. This seems more like insidious minds at work to me. What do you think?
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Suicide Instructions Spliced into Kids’ Cartoons on YouTube and YouTube Kids
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday February 26 2019, @07:03PM (1 child)
What is a children's video? Some kids, or perhaps millions of kids, are watching YouTube without any supervision at all. They are coming across all kinds of edgy content.
Here [youtube.com] we have what looks like a Splatoon "machinima" [wikipedia.org] type of video with the offensive green screen clip edited in (not spliced into a random video, but intentionally placed as part of the video). This content managed to sneak into YouTube Kids, a supposedly safer walled garden within YouTube for young children, because GooTube uses dumb machine learning algorithms to do almost everything on the platform.
I would not be surprised if the entire video, complete with the "sideways for attention, longways for results" meme, was created and uploaded by a 12-year-old child.
But yeah, if you are worried about your kids turning weird or dying, keep them far away from the Internet and YouTube. Just search "elsa spiderman" to find some of the disturbing content that is like crack cocaine or heroin for kids.
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(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 26 2019, @08:53PM
and then
Those are two unrelated things.
A children's video is intended for an audience of children. That's what a children's video is. Some topics, like putting suicide instructions into a child's video, might be a funny joke for an episode of South Park, but the intended audience of South Park (hopefully) is not children. (And I haven't watched it for over ten years now.)
Letting children roam busy streets or YouTube unsupervised is a lack of parental responsibility.
Also the internet is not a babysitter. Back in the day, a VHS tape could entertain a child for a short time. Today the internet seems to be used for that, but with no upper limit on time. Here's a bright shiny kid's tablet, have fun!
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