YouTube Kids is/was notorious for having awful content that’s often the laziest, lowest effort product that kids will sit through (aka the most obnoxious combination of repetitive sound effects and visuals you can imagine), propaganda trying to get em while they’re young, or some combination of both. Unfortunately a lot of people let their kids have unfettered access to it because it’s the only way they can get them to be relatively quiet and preoccupied for 30 minutes… Partially because algorithm-driven tech is like crack to brains, especially developing ones.
There was a whole thing about YouTube kids being filled with content about Spider-Man impregnating Elsa, there being lots of unhealthy portrayals of relationships as normal such as abusive dynamics between Mickey and Minnie mouse, and generally weird/inappropriate content featuring poo, pee, farts, stinky feet, blood and needles, or whatever else content mills thought they could get kids to click on. Most of these channels popped up because YouTube showed ads to kids at the time and it was some of the most lucrative revenue streams to be found on the platform for the effort required—kids will watch almost anything after all.
There were so many bots making algorithmically generated sludge to put in front of kids that it was literally too much to go through and curate out… Everything was getting infinitely re-uploaded across hundreds of channels to the point where if you let a kid watch YouTube on auto play, they’d be all but guaranteed to run into that sort of content eventually and get kind of sucked into it like a vortex.
It was known as ElsaGate and, in classic fashion, a lot of the legitimate issues people took with the situation also got bundled up with weird New World Order/right wing conspiracy type shit. As is known to happen.
YouTube is still as described above with kids content to a degree, but the company has taken a bare minimum effort to make those videos more difficult to monetize (and also taking anything vaguely kid-approximating down with it… Lots of animation aimed at an adult audience also gets flagged as for kids all the time).
I have a very young brother who had an obsession with Siren Head at one point from watching YouTube kids for who knows how many hours. My mom even asked at one point if I could make a video of Siren Head using the toilet as a potty training aid for him. I did not end up making the video but that’s a little beside the point.
Anyways there’s also a non-zero number of kids out there named Elsa by their parents. Yay Disney parents!
This is accurate to the joke I was making, yes. Thank you for your service writing all that out, because I really didn’t want to!
I’ll add that Elsa (and Daenerys) were briefly the most popular names for girls in the US, so there’s more than a few out there.
That kids-content crackdown has been very annoying for me. Many kids songs (or kid adjacent, like a lot of TMBG) is flagged as child content, which puts stupid restrictions on it like not being able to listen in the background. This even affects YT Music which makes listening to those songs in playlists and such difficult or impossible.
Features for literal babies, I guess. “Little Elsa sleeps better when we put on the Blue right-wing propaganda disguised as children’s shows.”
YouTube Kids is/was notorious for having awful content that’s often the laziest, lowest effort product that kids will sit through (aka the most obnoxious combination of repetitive sound effects and visuals you can imagine), propaganda trying to get em while they’re young, or some combination of both. Unfortunately a lot of people let their kids have unfettered access to it because it’s the only way they can get them to be relatively quiet and preoccupied for 30 minutes… Partially because algorithm-driven tech is like crack to brains, especially developing ones.
There was a whole thing about YouTube kids being filled with content about Spider-Man impregnating Elsa, there being lots of unhealthy portrayals of relationships as normal such as abusive dynamics between Mickey and Minnie mouse, and generally weird/inappropriate content featuring poo, pee, farts, stinky feet, blood and needles, or whatever else content mills thought they could get kids to click on. Most of these channels popped up because YouTube showed ads to kids at the time and it was some of the most lucrative revenue streams to be found on the platform for the effort required—kids will watch almost anything after all.
There were so many bots making algorithmically generated sludge to put in front of kids that it was literally too much to go through and curate out… Everything was getting infinitely re-uploaded across hundreds of channels to the point where if you let a kid watch YouTube on auto play, they’d be all but guaranteed to run into that sort of content eventually and get kind of sucked into it like a vortex.
It was known as ElsaGate and, in classic fashion, a lot of the legitimate issues people took with the situation also got bundled up with weird New World Order/right wing conspiracy type shit. As is known to happen.
YouTube is still as described above with kids content to a degree, but the company has taken a bare minimum effort to make those videos more difficult to monetize (and also taking anything vaguely kid-approximating down with it… Lots of animation aimed at an adult audience also gets flagged as for kids all the time).
I have a very young brother who had an obsession with Siren Head at one point from watching YouTube kids for who knows how many hours. My mom even asked at one point if I could make a video of Siren Head using the toilet as a potty training aid for him. I did not end up making the video but that’s a little beside the point.
Anyways there’s also a non-zero number of kids out there named Elsa by their parents. Yay Disney parents!
This is accurate to the joke I was making, yes. Thank you for your service writing all that out, because I really didn’t want to!
I’ll add that Elsa (and Daenerys) were briefly the most popular names for girls in the US, so there’s more than a few out there.
That kids-content crackdown has been very annoying for me. Many kids songs (or kid adjacent, like a lot of TMBG) is flagged as child content, which puts stupid restrictions on it like not being able to listen in the background. This even affects YT Music which makes listening to those songs in playlists and such difficult or impossible.