Yesterday, consumer groups presented a video to the FTC showing all of the adult content you can find on YouTube’s Kids app. The app was launched in February and through a screening process, is a quicker way to show your kids “family friendly” content. Many ads are even blocked on the app based on questionable language, themes, and products.
Is YouTube Kids A Safe Place for Young Children to Explore? from CCFC on Vimeo.
So what gives? A complaint filed in April by a group of family focused organiziations, like Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, allege that Google is violating federal laws by allowing children to access content that wouldn’t last on broadcast television. But you have to search for those videos through the app, and it’s no wonder the algorithms miss them. There are explicit scenes from movies recreated using cartoon characters or Bert and Ernie. CNN Money reports that:
Other videos the groups managed to dig up include a talk show host mentioning marijuana, a TED talk on suicide, Sarah Jessica Parker in a revealing skirt, and a dance lesson that includes a crotch grab.
YouTube has commented that “new content would be doubly filtered for quality control in the future, first algorithmically then by an internal team that would manually sample videos for quality control.” Which only means it would take longer for videos from the site to make it to the Kids app.
The quickest fix on YouTube’s part would be to turn the search feature off, or making that the default instead of making it something else to add to a parent’s to-do list. We’ve all made YouTube a very weird place, it’s no wonder it’s hard to regulate. And who dubs Big Bird saying naughty things anyway? It wouldn’t hurt to flag more videos instead of just quickly clicking away when you come across things in your click-hole. That’s just good Internet manners.