Did they license all those trademarked characters? Can takedown notices only be issued for copyright? Asking for a friend.
Youtube Kids spammers rack up billions of views on disturbing, violent, seemingly algorithmic videos
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The Kids videos and their like are deeply weird and disturbing. As I mentioned on another recent thread, my housemates and I were trying to find a Spider-Man trailer on YouTube a few months back and discovered the bizarre rabbit hole of hundreds of virtually identical “Spider-Man’s stinky feet” videos, each with hundreds of thousands of views, and had a similar “where the F is this stuff coming from?” reaction.
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Who makes this stuff?
Awww, I remember Hanna-Barbera too!
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I vividly remember reading a short SF-story about this very thing in one of those old Hugo Gernsback magazines.
In it, mankind had abandoned the planet but left all the robots switched on, so the entertainment bots were still generating television for the Nielsen rating-bots, and the algorithmic feedback was generating a loop that spurred the robots to produce increasingly bizarre programming.
Anybody know who wrote that story?
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Man, I have to pre watch or stick to official content channels like DC Superhero girls.
I remember watching just a compilation of cat videos and they were fine until an F bomb drops.
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Another reason why Sesame Street should still be broadcast on free public television, not HBO.
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There’s definitely an element of accessibility that I think needs to be brought into the discussion. As a parent who looks for ways to find certain shows for free online, YouTube sometimes appears to be the only recourse. If you lack the basic information literacy skills to determine what is the source versus a tawdry knock off, it’s easy to see why these videos are appealing. If you don’t have cable, and you don’t have Netflix, and you really want Peppa Pig, where else are you going to go?
To that extent it seems fairly predatory.
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I believe they have an absolute responsibility to deal with this, just as they have a responsibility to deal with the radicalisation of (mostly) young (mostly) men via extremist videos — of any political persuasion.
Bridle acknowledges that the problem is innate to capitalism. One might suppose that they would recognize that any efforts to counter capitalism are framed as being “radical”. The liberal approach is that capitalism can and should be reformed, tamed by some empowered and benevolent class of person - rather than acknowledging and accepting other kinds of social organization.
IMO all YouTube ever really needed was upload and search. All of that autoplay/recommendation/trending stuff is not only arguably useless to uploader and viewer alike (everybody apart from YouTube themselves), but encourages exploitation for the sake of a parasitic platform.
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I blame Itchy and/or Scratchy. (this is 52 minutes of them)
LOL I’ve seen a few of his, and I had the same thought.
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Better check for hidden messages under the obvious ones.
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Here is the problem: “My 8 year old watches, obviously…” Well, my 9 and 6 year old kids don’t. I tell them constantly: You may hate me, and you will hate me in the future, but I just don’t care. No phones, no video surfing, no game systems. You will thank me later.
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My question is how is Disney not all over this for ‘trademark infringement?’
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It’s absolutely still broadcast on PBS for free. The episodes just get shown on HBO first, and then on PBS a few months afterwards.
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Hypothetical: maybe they are.
If they put in a Content ID claim, they’d just get all the money from ads viewed. Since the Content ID process is automated, they could be getting money off the views of those videos without even being aware of the content. And they wouldn’t really give a shit about the content so long as the money keeps rolling in. And for the company making those videos, I’d say they could dispute a certain percentage of these automated Content ID claims — not too many, mind you — and get their share of revenue as well. Everybody wins!
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Except for the kids, of course.
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Oh, that’s a relief. Thanks!
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Kids aren’t people that matter, they’re revenue generators. Win, lose, it doesn’t matter so long as they view the content and the revenue thus generated goes to the corporations who are the people that matter in Youtube’s business model.
Personally, I think my friends who’ve banned their kids from watching youtube except under strict supervision have the right idea.
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They do to their parents.
Glad my kid is older; but even when she was little, I never just arbitrarily handed her my phone or a tablet to occupy her, like I see many folks do nowadays. Different strokes for different folks, though.
Yay for having raised mine on all the stuff I grew up on; Schoolhouse Rock, the Electric Company, classic Sesame Street, so she had a foundation of quality programming to compare to if/when she comes across crap like this.
Same with music; all she heard for the first decade or so of her life was Motown, classic rock, and all the real music that existed before autotune cookie-cutter crap became “the norm.”
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