Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/26/pretty-ugly-stuff.html
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My wife and I were discussing this last night. What sort of sick person does this? And there’s no way that Google would ever pay for the army of moderators it would need to keep this from happening, it’s “not scalable.”
The internet is so great and at the same time can also be quite terrible.
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That’s not a “griefer”…that’s a psychopath who should be picked up and institutionalized for a little while.
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Time for trust busters to make them small enough that they can moderate their content again.
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So, is that a guy aping George Miller (Joji, Filthy Frank) or actual clips of George giving that advice in the cartoon? I wouldn’t be surprised at either.
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what the actual f—
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This will literally never change as long as companies like google allow random anonymous people to upload content “for kids”. There’s a reason the FCC has rules for children’s programming
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Well, there are times when one would like to hang the whole human race and finish the farce.
—Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
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“Blah, blah, blah… government over-reach, blah, blah, corporations can police themselves, blah, blah, free market.”
-some Ann Ryan doofus somewhere.
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You can tell this comes from the moderated side of the operation because it’s approximately accurate advice presented wholly without a thick coat of ‘edgy’ racism or some sort of conspiracy theory.
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How about a long while?
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that is fucking dark.
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The people making the videos are the moderators. Whether or not they are paid.
That is why Youtube is one of the most vile places on the internet.
There is actually more moderation going on in the Breitbart comment threads.
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‘infamous’ is a funny word…
It’s pretty nasty and twisted, but no, it’s actually amazingly nasty; almost deserving of some kind of awfulness-award.
I’m all confused now.
That’s plain ol’ nasty to think about, innit.
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Before it even got to this point, we had to remove YouTube Kids from our child’s tablet. The videos that are just a corporate logo and jingle, played over and over, speeding up each time? Pure brainwashing.
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Before the inevitable “lazy parents should know better than to leave their kids unattended with YouTube” sniping I’ve seen everywhere else shows up here…
This is specifically YouTube Kids, a separate application from YouTube, which Google (an organization that many everyday people still trust a great deal because they haven’t fucked up quite as incessantly as Facebook) specifically targets at parents as, essentially, a moderated safe space for kids. Given that children’s programming on television can be reasonably relied on not to inject suicide instructions into the middle of an episode of Blue’s Clues, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for normal people to take Google at their word when they say that YouTube Kids is child-safe.
Conveniently, unless it shows up somewhere in the app as well, the warning that “inappropriate videos can slip through” is hidden below the fold in the app’s description on Google Play, and is itself beneath an above-the-fold header that says “a safer online experience for kids”. Google isn’t necessarily lying about the safety of the application, but they seem to do everything they can to minimize the prominence of their warnings. There are also complaints in the top-line reviews that the parental controls aren’t applying to the app’s Recommended tab, which is the permanent launch point for the app. So even Google’s attempts to mitigate this issue by foisting the labor onto parents (which, as far as I can tell from the Wayback Machine, were only added in October of last year) are broken.
Reactionary moderation is barely passable for the internet at large, but it’s completely insufficient and inexcusable when it comes to delivering content to children. Google essentially foisting the impact of their systems’ failures onto unsuspecting kids and their parents is just gross.
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@doctorow, you are a parent. Others here as well. I don’t know how large the percentage compared to the overall population is (but could look it up if you like), but I guess statistically most people are or become parents at some point.
So, what do we actually need to do if we notice a video or other content clearly harmful for children and aimed at children?
To be more specific, Cory:
news outlets often supply at least one point of contact for people contemplating suicide. So, what do you think - who should we contact if we find a children’s video including suicide advice?
(What is a bit problematic: yt is a global supplier of this kind of shit, and laws and institutions who might have leverage are national, mostly. But at least give us a starting point. )
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it might help if you hold down the “reset” button for thirty seconds while rebooting your child
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It looks like an old clip of Filthy Frank. Here is a video for additional context:
Agree with the general sentiment in this thread: YouTube Kids needs to be heavily moderated and parents should heavily moderate their children’s web activity on the whole.
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