Speaker 1: There's something very strange happening on the YouTube Kids app,
Speaker 1: and some of it is certainly not appropriate for children.
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland and this is tech stuff daily. YouTube Kids
Speaker 1: is an app that Google markets directly to parents of
Speaker 1: young children. In fact, on the landing page for the app,
Speaker 1: you'll find a description that reads a safer online experience
Speaker 1: for kids. Just below that is a caveat, however, and
Speaker 1: one that seems to be in response to a flurry
Speaker 1: of news stories about questionable content popping up on the platform.
Speaker 1: The caveat says YouTube Kids is designed to filter out
Speaker 1: inappropriate videos for kids, but no system is perfect. If
Speaker 1: a video that's inappropriate shows up in the app, you
Speaker 1: have the power to block it, flag it, and bring
Speaker 1: it to our attention for fast review. That probably comes
Speaker 1: as small comfort to parents who have seen their kids
Speaker 1: react to some truly bizarre and in some cases out
Speaker 1: right disturbingly violent or provocative content. Media outlets including Medium
Speaker 1: and The New York Times have reported on the large
Speaker 1: number of odd and sometimes upsetting videos that come up
Speaker 1: either through searching specific terms or as suggested videos picked
Speaker 1: by various algorithms. So, what the heck is going on there? Are,
Speaker 1: not surprisingly, several elements to this story, and part of
Speaker 1: it is just due to the sheer amount of video
Speaker 1: being uploaded to YouTube. That's about four hundred hours of
Speaker 1: video joining the platform every minute. In other words, within
Speaker 1: ten minutes, four thousand hours of video jumps on board.
Speaker 1: At that scale, it's literally impossible to have human beings
Speaker 1: combed through the video content and make sure everything is
Speaker 1: on the up and up. You either automate or you
Speaker 1: shut down. If humans were responsible for reviewing all the footage,
Speaker 1: they'd find themselves falling further behind with every minute of
Speaker 1: video they reviewed. It would be as if they were
Speaker 1: in one of those horror movies where a character runs
Speaker 1: down a hall only to see the door at the
Speaker 1: end get further away. Another issue is that we've gotten
Speaker 1: pretty good at automation in general, not great at it,
Speaker 1: but good enough for it to be a problem. For example,
Speaker 1: you might create an algorithm that looks for the most
Speaker 1: popular search terms used on platform like YouTube kids. You
Speaker 1: get this list of terms, which likely have little to
Speaker 1: do with one another, and you use a different algorithm
Speaker 1: to piece together a nonsensical video that takes those different
Speaker 1: components and creates a sort of mash up. The resulting
Speaker 1: video would likely be pretty awful, but still pop up
Speaker 1: in search or along a list of related videos in
Speaker 1: a sidebar. There are also automated programs that drive up
Speaker 1: video viewing numbers. In other words, some of these videos
Speaker 1: may have been designed and even assembled by bots and
Speaker 1: shown to other bots. Based on the quality of some
Speaker 1: of these videos, I think it's safe to say that
Speaker 1: robots have exceedingly low standards when it comes to entertainment.
Speaker 1: If that were all there were to this story, it
Speaker 1: would be curious but not terribly important. But those videos
Speaker 1: are also seen by children, not just brainless algorithms, and
Speaker 1: some of the videos can be quite upsetting. It's likely
Speaker 1: that so called bad actors made some of those videos,
Speaker 1: particularly the more egregiously violent or inappropriate ones, whether they
Speaker 1: were doing it as an attempt at satire or just
Speaker 1: to take figures that appeal to kids and put them
Speaker 1: in inappropriate situations. The problem is that some of these
Speaker 1: videos are slipping through the filters on YouTube kids and
Speaker 1: are being seen by actual children. So why would anyone
Speaker 1: bother to do this? If we set aside those who
Speaker 1: just enjoy stirring up trouble and causing distress. It likely
Speaker 1: comes down to money. Specifically, we're talking ad revenue. If
Speaker 1: you want to make a lot of money off of
Speaker 1: YouTube videos, you need to get as many eyeballs on
Speaker 1: those videos as possible while bringing down the cost of
Speaker 1: production as much as you can. That's where all that
Speaker 1: automation comes in. The videos don't have to have good content,
Speaker 1: they just have to be good at being discovered. A
Speaker 1: quick search through the kid videos will uncover plenty of
Speaker 1: ones that have nonsensical titles consisting solely of popular keywords.
Speaker 1: If people were involved in any step in that process,
Speaker 1: it was with a light touch. Children also tend to
Speaker 1: fixate uncertain characters, songs, nursery rhymes, or other elements that
Speaker 1: video producers can exploit. The result is an onslaught of
Speaker 1: low quality and sometimes wildly inappropriate content. The money side
Speaker 1: of this issue is a huge problem. The video publishers
Speaker 1: are making money by serving up ads against these videos.
Speaker 1: YouTube takes a cut of that money as well, so
Speaker 1: there's a lot of incentive to make tons of content
Speaker 1: optimized to get lots of views, and little incentive on
Speaker 1: YouTube's part to crack down on it. In addition, short
Speaker 1: of developing incredibly effective algorithms that can somehow judge quality.
Speaker 1: There are few logical options open to the company to
Speaker 1: combat the trend. At the moment, the onus seems to
Speaker 1: fall on parents. They are meant to report troublesome videos,
Speaker 1: which can be removed by you Tube, but by then
Speaker 1: the damage may be done personally. I do think parents
Speaker 1: have a responsibility to make certain their children aren't being
Speaker 1: exposed to inappropriate material, but I also think YouTube should
Speaker 1: hold itself accountable for marketing and app to kids without
Speaker 1: being able to make certain the content on that app
Speaker 1: is actually appropriate. If the company cannot guarantee that, I
Speaker 1: think it should probably not offer the app, But there's
Speaker 1: a lot of money to be made, so I suspect
Speaker 1: it will stick around. That's all for today. To learn
Speaker 1: more about streaming media, online communities, and other tricky subjects
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