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Google's YouTube Kids application has come under fire from advocates who argue that the platform exposes kids to deceptive advertising practices disguised as entertainment. The YouTube Kids app was announced in February, and was designed to include an easy-to-use interface, content filtering, and parental controls.
"YouTube Kids is the most hyper-commercialized media environment for children I have ever seen," commented Dale Kunkel, a professor of communication at University of Arizona. "Many of these advertising tactics are considered illegal on television, and it's sad to see Google trying to get away with using them in digital media."
[...] "There is nothing 'child friendly' about an app that obliterates long-standing principles designed to protect kids from commercialism. YouTube Kids exploits children's developmental vulnerabilities by delivering a steady stream of advertising that masquerades as programming," said Josh Golin, director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.
The complaint [PDF] was written by The Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood (CCFC), American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Children Now, Consumer Federation of America, Consumer Watchdog, and Public Citizen. It alleges that the intermixing of advertising and entertainment, the proliferation of undisclosed product endorsements, and lackluster screening of ads by YouTube's policy team all violate Section 5 of the FTC Act.
The campaigners cite "unboxing videos" as a particular concern. In one example:
This 7:41 segment is essentially a 7-minute long commercial for McDonald's. The entire segment is filmed in a play scene of McDonald's where dolls from Disney's Frozen movies enjoy toy versions of McDonald's products. According to the person in the video, "We are at McDonald's with Elsa and Ana... Ana is having her favorite ice cream sundae and Elsa is having a Sprite."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday April 08 2015, @01:06PM
takyon's tankspam below is weirdly on topic because everyone looks at the pix, err, youtube videos, and reads the text last or not at all.
(VLM glances down) all three of my desktop monitors have "SAMSUNG" in 1 cm tall letters along the bottom bezel, but I never read it.
A third really good analogy is its like captions on pr0n.
I can think of three "real" parental annoyances with youtube as opposed to the irrelevant hyperauthoritarian complaints:
1) Kids will watch the same thing over and over. They have a tolerance for it that adults can't comprehend. So my daughter is probably a large fraction of the hundreds of millions of views of the "frozen" song and "what does the fox say". I find it hard to tolerate, like being in an open office but I'm not being paid to put up with that. Limit views to 10 times and done, or lower res every view till they give up in disgust or something?
2) My wife is under the weird impression that kids would never learn or use swear words if not for youtube and no discussion of her own youth seems to fix that and according to her, movies and music and books also do not contain any swear words and the only source on the planet of swear words is that darn youtube. This leads to much teasing along the lines of if the only way to learn swear words is youtube and she knows (and uses) them all then what youtube videos is she watching? The problem is not so much gangsta rap from the 90s with 10M views thats already flagged, but stuff like lets play game videos with like five views that primarily consist of some 10 year old kid saying the F word every ten seconds and calling all the other players pretty much every minority group that exists (which is also a pretty good summary of why multi-player gaming generally sucks and is best avoided)
3) Kids shows are just obnoxious yet there seems a parental desire to at least keep an eye on what they're watching to keep them out of trouble as per above and no matter how carefully evantube or stampylongface is precision engineered to hopelessly addict kids, its just Fing annoying to adults, even if thankfully the kids only watch it once.
I like the unboxing videos, when I buy something, I'll check it out first, see what I'm "really" getting.