Internet: everything is very bad
- Transfer
Unbeknownst garbage penetrates the brains of hundreds of millions of children and we are all accomplices in this.
I'm James Bridle . I am a writer and artist concerned about technology and culture. I usually write on my own blog, but to be honest, I don’t want what I say here to be somewhere close to my own site. Please note: this essay describes disturbing things and links to disturbing graphic and video content. You do not have to read this, and I recommend that you exercise caution when studying.
As a person who grew up on the Internet, I believe that the network has had one of the most important influences on who I am today. In my room there was a computer with internet access from 13 years old. This gave me access to many things that were completely inappropriate for a teenager, but everything was in order. The culture, politics and interpersonal relationships that I consider to be the main ones for my personality were formed on the Internet in a way that I have always considered useful for myself personally. I have always been a critical supporter of the Internet and everything that it brought, and on the whole I considered it emancipational and useful. I declare this from the very beginning, because, reflecting on the consequences of the problem, I will largely rely on my own generalizations and prejudices.
One of these hypothetical questions that I ask myself most often is what I will feel when my own children have the same access to the Internet today. And I understand that it is becoming increasingly difficult to answer the question. I understand that this is a natural evolution of relationships that occur with age, and at some point this issue can be much less hypothetical. I do not want to be a hypocrite in this. I would like my children to have the same opportunities to explore and grow and express themselves as I do. I would like them to have that choice. And this belief expands the attitude to the role of the Internet in public life in general.
For a while I was also aware of the increasingly symbiotic relationship between children and YouTube. I see that children watch the screen enthusiastically all the time, in strollers and in restaurants, and there is always a little feeling of Luddism, but I am not a parent, and I do not accept parental judgments for anyone. I saw how family members and friends of a friend connected to watching Peppa Pig and videos with nursery rhymes, and this made them happy and gave everyone a break, so everything is fine.
But I don’t even have children, and now I just want to destroy it all.
Someone, or something, or an association of people and things uses YouTube to systematically scare, injure, and abuse children, automatically and on a large scale, and this makes me question my own beliefs about the Internet at all levels. Most of what I am going to describe below has been covered elsewhere, although none of the popular lighting that I saw really understood the consequences of what seems to be happening.
To get started: YouTube Kids is definitely and noticeably weird. For some time I knew about this oddity. Many articles about Surprise Eggs were published last year. The videos from Surprise Eggs, often lengthy and painful, show the process of deploying Kinder and other eggs with toys. This is all the content, but the children are fascinated by it. There are hundreds and thousands of these videos and hundreds and thousands, if not millions, of children watching them.
From the article above :
This should give you some idea of how strange the world of online children's videos is, and this list of videos hints at the extreme scale and complexity of this situation. It looks harmless, but after a couple of minutes you will realize that this is part of some rather strange garbage.
Another huge image, especially for the youngest children, is children's rhymed videos.
Little Baby Bum , who made the aforementioned video, is YouTube ’s 7th most popular channel . In just 515 videos, they scored 11.5 million subscribers and 13 billion views . Again, there are questions regarding the accuracy of these numbers that I will receive soon, but the key point is that this is a huge, huge network and industry.
Video is a decoy for parents and for children, and therefore for content creators and advertisers. Young children are mesmerized by these videos, whether they are familiar characters and songs, or simply vibrant colors and soothing sounds. The duration of many of these videos is one common goal of the video is to collect many poems for children or cartoons into watch collections - and thus the length is positioned as part of the appeal of the video, indicating the amount of time some children spend with it.
In this way, YouTube channel presenters have developed a huge number of tactics to draw the attention of parents and children to their videos, as well as the advertising revenue that accompanies them. The first of these tactics is simply copying and piracy of other content. A simple Peppa Pig search on YouTube in my case yielded “about 10.4 million results”, the first page consists almost entirely of videos from the official Peppa Pig Official Channel, and one of the videos from an unofficial channel called Play Go Toys, which you really wouldn't notice if you weren't looking for it:
Play Go Toys Channelconsists of (I suppose?) pirated content Peppa Pig and other cartoons, videos with toys anboxing (another magnet for children) and, presumably, videos with the channel’s own children. I am not saying anything bad about Play Go Toys; I’m just showing how YouTube’s structure facilitates the stratification of content and the author, and how it affects our awareness and trust in its source.
As another blogger notesOne of the traditional roles of branded content is that it is a trusted source. Whether it’s Peppa Pig on the children's channel or Disney films, whatever the feelings for the industrial model of entertainment production are, they are carefully thought out and controlled so that the children are essentially safe to watch and trust them. This no longer works when the brand and the content are not connected by the platform, and the well-known and reliable content provides a seamless gateway for unverified and potentially harmful content.
(Yes, this is the same process as bundling reliable media in Facebook feeds and Google results, which are currently causing such damage to our educational and political systems, and I will not explicitly study these relations further now, but this is obviously of great importance.) The
second way to increase the number of video views is through a keyword / hashtag association, which itself in itself is a whole dark art. When a trend, such as Surprise Egg videos, reaches a critical mass, content producers fall on it, creating hundreds and thousands of these videos in any possible quantity. This is the source of all the strange names in the list above: branded content and the names of nursery rhymes and “surprise egg”, all stuffed into a salad of similar words to capture search results, placement on the side panels and an “up” rating for auto play.
A prime example of weirdness is the Finger Family video (a harmless example, pasted above). I have no idea where they came from, and about the origin of the nursery rhyme at the heart of the images, but there are at least 17 million versions on YouTube , and they again cover all possible genres: with a total of billions of views.
Again, the number of views on these videos should have been taken seriously under control. A huge number of these videos are mainly created by bots and viewed by bots, and even commented on by bots. This is a whole strange world in itself. But you should not hide that there are also many real children immersed in iPhones and tablets, watch it again and again - in part, given the increased number of views - they are taught to type basic search terms in the browser or simply scroll through the sidebar to include another video.
What I find somewhat disturbing about the distribution of ordinary (relatively) normal children's videos is the inability to determine the degree of automation that works here; how to understand the gap between man and machine. The example above, from a channel called Bounce Patrol Kids, with nearly two million subscribers, demonstrates this effect in action. They publish professionally created videos, with real actors, about one video per week. Once again, I am not saying anything bad about Bounce Patrol, which clearly follows in the footsteps of pre-digital childhood sensations, like their Australian counterparts The Wiggles .
And yet there is something strange about a group of people who endlessly act regardless of the combination of algorithmically generated keywords: “Halloween Finger Family & more Halloween Songs for Children | Kids Halloween Songs Collection ”,“ Australian Animals Finger Family Song | Finger Family Nursery Rhymes ”,“ Farm Animals Finger Family and more Animals Songs | Finger Family Collection - Learn Animals Sounds ”,“ Safari Animals Finger Family Song | Elephant, Lion, Giraffe, Zebra & Hippo! Wild Animals for kids ”,“ Superheroes Finger Family and more Finger Family Songs! Superhero Finger Family Collection ”,“ Batman Finger Family Song - Superheroes and Villains! Batman, Joker, Riddler, Catwoman ”on and on. This is the production of content in the era of algorithmic discovery - even if you are a person,
Other channels abandoned the real actors to create endless reconfigurable versions of the same videos over and over again. What happens here is clearly automated. Stock animations, audio tracks, and thousands of keyword lists create an endless stream of video. The aforementioned channel, Videogyan 3D Rhymes - Nursery Rhymes & Baby Songs , posts a few videos a week, using more byzantine in keyword combinations. They have almost five million subscribers - twice as many as Bounce Patrol - although I will say it again - it is impossible to find out who or what is actually doing these millions and millions of views.
I try not to turn this essay into an endless list of examples, but it’s important to understand how extensive this system is and how vague its actions, process and audience are. It is also international in nature: there are variations of the Finger Family and Learn Colors videos for Tamil epics and Malaysian cartoons , which are unlikely to appear in search results in the English version. This uncertainty and reach are key to its existence and its consequences. Its dimension makes understanding difficult.
We came across very obvious examples of the alarming results of full automation before that - some of them were fortunately left with dark humor, others - not so many. Much has been done with the help of algorithmic crossings of stock photo libraries and at the request of production, everything from T-shirts to mugs, from baby overalls to phone cases. The above example, available until recently on Amazon, is one such case, and the story of how it happened is fascinating and strange, but essentially understandable.. No one was going to create phone cases with drugs and medical equipment on them, it was just a very strange mathematical / probabilistic result. The fact that it took some time to notice can cause some disturbing calls.
Similarly, the “Keep Calm and Rape A Lot” T-shirt label(along with Keep Calm and Knife Her and Keep Calm and Hit Her) is depressing and sad, but it’s pretty clear that no one was going to create these shirts: they simply linked an uncontrolled list of verbs and pronouns using an online image generator. It is possible that not one of these T-shirts that ever physically existed was ever bought or worn, and therefore there was no harm. And again, the people creating this content did not notice, and the distributor did nothing. They literally had no idea what they were doing .
What I will argue about on the basis of these cases and those that I will discuss later is that the scope and logic of the system are accomplices of these results and require us to analyze their consequences.
(And again: I’m not going to delve into the broader social consequences of such processes beyond what I am writing about here, but it’s clear that a clear line can be drawn from such examples as pressing contemporary issues such as racial and gender bias in large data systems and machine systems that require urgent attention, but in the same way have nothing like simple or even preferred solutions.)
Let's look at only one video among a pile of video for children and try to figure out where it comes from come from. It is important to emphasize that I was not going to find this video: it turned out to be higher in rating when searching for “finger family” in incognito mode(that is, it should not be affected by a previous search). This automation leads us to very, very strange places, and at this moment the rabbit hole is so deep that it is impossible to understand how it happened.
Once again, a warning about the content: this video is not entirely inappropriate, but it is clearly disabled and contains elements that may bother someone. It is very soft on the scale of such things, but. I write it below if you do not want to watch it and follow this road. This warning will be repeated.
The above video is called Wrong Heads Disney Wrong Ears Wrong Legs Kids Learn Colors Finger Family 2017 Nursery Rhymes . The name confirms its automatic origin. I have no idea where the expression “Wrong Heads” comes from, but I can imagine that, like with the Finger Family song, somewhere there is a completely original and harmless version of which the children laughed after it, processed by the algorithm, turned into a list of words that are incoherent with each other, combined with Learn Colors, Finger Family and Nursery Rhymes, and all these combinations - not just like words, but like images, processes and actions - are mixed with what we see here.
The video consists of the usual version of the Finger Family song, performed over an animation of the changing and intersecting heads and bodies of characters from Disney Aladin. Again, this is strange, but frankly, no more than Surprise Egg videos or anything else that children watch. I understand how innocent it is. The discrepancy is accompanied by the appearance of a non-Aladdin character - Agni, the little girl from Despicable Me. Agnes is the arbiter of the scene: when the heads do not match, she cries, when they match, she rejoices.
The creator of the video, BABYFUN TV (screenshot above), has released many similar videos. Like many of the videos with the wrong connecting heads that I could watch, they worked exactly the same. Cartoon character Puzzle cries when changing heads of Trolls and Smurfsbetween themselves. It goes on and on. I see this as a game, but the constant overlapping and mixing of different types gradually penetrates into us. BABYFUN TV has only 170 subscribers and a very low number of views, but there are thousands and thousands of such channels. The numbers in this long tail are inconsequential in the abstract sense, but their number is essential .
The question arises: how did this happen? The image of “Bad Baby”, also present on the BABYFUN channel, has the same cry. While I find it disturbing, I can understand that it can provide some rhythm or attitude to their own experience, because real children are involved in the content of the video. Although it was stretched and distorted by algorithmic repetition and recombination in such a way that I do not think anyone wants this to happen to him.
Toy Freaks is an extremely popular channel ( 68th on the platform ) in which the father and his two daughters act out - or, in some cases, possibly behave like in life - like many of the images we've highlighted before, including “Bad Baby,” above. Like nursery rhymes and teaching flowers, Toy Freaks specializes in abusive situations, as well as other genres, many people watching this channel are on the verge of their indignation if they do not go beyond it, seeing a video with how children behave disgustingly, Toy Freaks Is a YouTube-approved channel, no matter what it means. (I think we know that now this does not mean anything ).
As in the case of Bounce Patrol Kids, you feel that the content of these videos is impossible to understand, it is impossible to figure out where the meaning begins and ends, who comes up with ideas and who plays them. In turn, the images in popular human-led channels, such as Toy Freaks, lead to the fact that they are endlessly repeated over the network in ever more outlandish forms.
This is the next level of video, described by me as a video involving people who are basically much more anxious than the unpleasant actions of Toy Freaks and their relatives. Here is a relatively mild but still frustrating example:
Going beyond just the pirated Peppa Pig videos mentioned earlier is an insult. They also abound in violence. Peppa really goes to the dentist in the official Peppa Pig commercials, and the episode in which she does this seems popular - although it is unclear what seems like a real episode is available only on an unofficial channel. In the official version, Peppa was reassured by a gracious dentist. In the version above, she is mostly tortured before becoming a series of Iron Man robots and performing Learn Colors dances. The search “Peppa Pig at the Dentist” returns the aforementioned video on the first page, this only worsens the situation.
Shocking videos with Peppa Pig, which tend to extreme violence and fear, with Peppa eating her father orDrinking bleach are, as it turned out, very common. They make up the whole YouTube subculture. Many, obviously, skits or even satires in themselves, are quite common on the Internet and are intentionally done in an offensive and outrageous style. In all 4chan communities, there is a mockery of the video data, we know that.
In the example above, the type is less clear: the video starts with a mockery of Peppa, but later mixes with automatic repetition of the images that we recently saw. I do not know which camp this belongs to. Maybe it's just a parody of such cartoons, I hope so, but I'm not sure. Parodies do not cover the intersection of real actors and more automatic examples further down the line. They play here but that’s not all.
I believe it would be naive not to see the intentions of these versions, but many of them are so close to the original, and therefore not indicated - as an example of a dentist - of which there are many, many children look at them. I understand that most of them do not try to confuse children, even if it seems so.
I try to understand why, if this is a problem, why the question "Does anyone think about children?" Obviously, this content is inappropriate, it’s obvious that the actors are bad, it’s obvious that most of these videos should be removed. Obviously, this also raises questions about the legality of use, appropriation, free speech, etc.
But reports that simply explain the problem through pink glasses cannot fully understand what mechanisms are unfolding, and therefore are not able to think about the consequences of what this could lead to to take appropriate measures.
The New York Times titled its article on this issue as “On YouTube Kids , a shocking video slipped past the filters,” which emphasizes the use of fake characters and nursery rhymes in prohibited content, and urges that this be considered as a problem in the work of moderators and the law. YouTube Kids, the official app that claims to be safe for the baby, but is obviously a problem, because it fraudulently generates trust in users. An article in the British The Sun:“Children who remained injured after sick YouTube videos showing Peppa Pig characters with knives and shotguns that appeared in the application for children,” also took the right side, adding a dose of technophobia and self-righteousness. But both stories assume YouTube’s fundamental claims that such videos are incredibly rare and quickly deleted: Statements are completely refuted by the spread of the stories themselves and the growing number of posts on social networks, mainly from interested parents from whom they arise.
But, as is the case with Toy Freaks, what concerns me with Peppa videos is how obvious skits and even darker fakes interact with legions of algorithmic content developers until it's completely impossible to find out what is happening. (“The creatures from the outside looked like a pig to a man, and from a man to a pig and from a pig to a man again, but it's impossible to say what it was.”)
This is what the version of Toy Freaks released in Asia is (screenshot above). Here is one from Russia. I really do not want to use the term “human-led” for these videos anymore, although they contain all the same images and actual people who violate them. I don’t know what is going on here anymore, and I really don’t want this, and I start to think that this is a kind of point. This is part of why I'm starting to think about the awareness of all this. A lot of effort has been put into creating this. And brings more revenue than spam - right? Who writes these scripts while editing these videos? Once again I want to emphasize: this is still very soft, even funny material compared to what is there.
Here are a few things that really bother me:
First is the level of fear and violence. This is offensive for a while; most of the time he seems deeper and more unconscious. The Internet has a way of enhancing and embodying many of our hidden desires; in fact, this is what seems best done. I spend a lot of time discussing this trend with regard to human sexual freedom, personality, and other issues. Here, and overwhelmingly, one sometimes feels that this tendency is itself brutal and destructive.
Secondly, levels of use, not children, because they are children, but children, because they are helpless to suggestion. Automated reward systems, such as YouTube’s algorithms, require use just as capitalism needs to consume materials, and if you are someone who opposes the second half of this equation, then perhaps this should be what convinces you of it the truth. Operation is encoded in the systems that we build, which complicates the work, it is more difficult to think and understand what we should fight against and what to defend against. AI lords and robots in factories are not somewhere in the future, but right here, now, on your screen, in your living room and in your pocket.
Many of these latest examples contradict any attempt to claim that no one actually watches these videos, that these are all bots. People are involved in this chain, at least on the production side, and I am also very worried about them.
I have written enough, too much, but I feel that I really need to justify all this nonsense about violence and abuse and automated systems with an example that sums it up. Maybe, after all that I said, you will not think that everything is so bad. Personally, I do not know what to think next.
This video, the BURIED ALIVE Outdoor Playground Finger Family Song Nursery Rhymes Animation Education Learning Video , contains all the elements that we reviewed above and takes them to a different level. Familiar characters, children's images, verbal nonsense, full automation, violence, as well as the worst desires of children. And, of course, a huge number of these videos. Channel after channel after channel of similar content, each month is released at the speed of hundreds of new videos. Industrial production of nightmares.
Recently: there is more violent and sexier content like this. I am not going to refer to it. I do not believe in the trauma of ordinary people, but you need to continue to emphasize this, and not deny the psychological effect on children of things that are not clearly disturbing for adults, just incredibly absurd and strange.
A friend who works on digital video told me what needs to be done to create something like this: a small studio of people (half a dozen, maybe more), making large amounts of low-quality content to generate advertising revenue, disabling certain requirements systems (in particular, to some extent, duration). According to my friend, children's online content is one of the few alternative ways to make money from 3D animation, due to the low quality standards of animation, and the emphasis is on quantity. It uses existing and easily accessible content (for example, character models and motion capture libraries), and it can be repeated and revised endlessly and mostly meaningless because the algorithms do not distinguish - and children too.
These videos, wherever they are made, they are created, and regardless of the conscious intention (that is, to accumulate revenue from advertising), they use a system that was originally intended to show videos for children, for profit. Unconsciously created, they leave the result of their work everywhere.
We are not talking about the controversial, but undoubtedly the real consequences of violence in movies or video games for teenagers, or about the consequences of pornography or extreme images for young minds that were mentioned in my introductory description of my own teenage use of the Internet. This is an important debate, but this is not what is being discussed here. We are talking about very young children, effective from birth, deliberately targeting content that will hurt and bother them, through networks that are extremely vulnerable to this particular form of violence. This is not about trolls, but about a kind of violence inherent in the combination of digital systems and capitalist incentives. It drops to iron level.
My point of view: The system is responsible for the misuse of these materials.
And right now, right here, YouTube and Google are partners in this system. The architecture that they built to maximize the revenue from online videos used by individuals who are unaware of the harm done to children may not even be intentional, but on a massive scale. I believe that they are fully responsible for this, as they are responsible for the radicalization of (mostly) young (mostly) men through extremist videos - any political beliefs. They still have not shown absolutely no tendency to this, which in itself is despicable. However, a huge part of my troubling answer to this question is that I have no idea how they can respond without shutting down the service itself, and most systems that resemble it. We created a world which works on a scale where human control is simply impossible, and no inhumane measure will oppose most of the examples I used in this essay. The fears that I left in parentheses everywhere, if raised for general discussion, would allow me to rewrite everything I said with minimal effort, not about child abuse, but about white nationalism, about violent religious ideologies, about fake news , about climate denial, about the 9/11 conspiracy.
This is a very dark time when the structures that we created for ourselves are used against us - all of us - in a systematic and automated way. It is difficult to maintain faith in the network when it produces such horrors. Although I want to reject the wilder examples as simple ridicule, of which, of course, a significant figure, does not take into account the sheer volume of content, weighted in a particularly grotesque direction. It presents many complex and hidden dangers, including the fact that, like increasing attention to Russia's alleged interference in social networks, such events will be used as an excuse to strengthen control over the Internet, increase censorship, etc. This is not what most of us would like.
I will stop here, talking only about this:
It’s not just child abuse that bothers me, although it directly concerns me. My opinion is that this is just one aspect of a kind of infrastructural violence committed by all of us all the time, and we are still trying to find a way to talk about it, to describe the mechanisms of its work and the consequences. As I said at the beginning of this essay: this is done by people, technologies, and a combination of technologies and people. It is impossible to shift the responsibility for its results to someone, but the damage is very, very real.
Translation: Vyacheslav Bukatov
I'm James Bridle . I am a writer and artist concerned about technology and culture. I usually write on my own blog, but to be honest, I don’t want what I say here to be somewhere close to my own site. Please note: this essay describes disturbing things and links to disturbing graphic and video content. You do not have to read this, and I recommend that you exercise caution when studying.
As a person who grew up on the Internet, I believe that the network has had one of the most important influences on who I am today. In my room there was a computer with internet access from 13 years old. This gave me access to many things that were completely inappropriate for a teenager, but everything was in order. The culture, politics and interpersonal relationships that I consider to be the main ones for my personality were formed on the Internet in a way that I have always considered useful for myself personally. I have always been a critical supporter of the Internet and everything that it brought, and on the whole I considered it emancipational and useful. I declare this from the very beginning, because, reflecting on the consequences of the problem, I will largely rely on my own generalizations and prejudices.
One of these hypothetical questions that I ask myself most often is what I will feel when my own children have the same access to the Internet today. And I understand that it is becoming increasingly difficult to answer the question. I understand that this is a natural evolution of relationships that occur with age, and at some point this issue can be much less hypothetical. I do not want to be a hypocrite in this. I would like my children to have the same opportunities to explore and grow and express themselves as I do. I would like them to have that choice. And this belief expands the attitude to the role of the Internet in public life in general.
For a while I was also aware of the increasingly symbiotic relationship between children and YouTube. I see that children watch the screen enthusiastically all the time, in strollers and in restaurants, and there is always a little feeling of Luddism, but I am not a parent, and I do not accept parental judgments for anyone. I saw how family members and friends of a friend connected to watching Peppa Pig and videos with nursery rhymes, and this made them happy and gave everyone a break, so everything is fine.
But I don’t even have children, and now I just want to destroy it all.
Someone, or something, or an association of people and things uses YouTube to systematically scare, injure, and abuse children, automatically and on a large scale, and this makes me question my own beliefs about the Internet at all levels. Most of what I am going to describe below has been covered elsewhere, although none of the popular lighting that I saw really understood the consequences of what seems to be happening.
To get started: YouTube Kids is definitely and noticeably weird. For some time I knew about this oddity. Many articles about Surprise Eggs were published last year. The videos from Surprise Eggs, often lengthy and painful, show the process of deploying Kinder and other eggs with toys. This is all the content, but the children are fascinated by it. There are hundreds and thousands of these videos and hundreds and thousands, if not millions, of children watching them.
From the article above :
The creator of my favorite videos is “Blu Toys Surprise Brinquedos & Juegos,” and since 2010 he has gained 3.7 million subscribers and just under 6 billion views on a children's channel dedicated entirely to opening surprise toys and unpacking toys. Video titles are a template for obscure brand names and binders: Surprise Play Doh Eggs Peppa Pig Stamper Cars Pocoyo Minecraft Smurfs Kinder Play Doh Sparkle Brilho , Cars Screamin` Banshee Eats Lightning McQueen Disney Pixar , Disney Baby Pop Up Pals Easter Eggs SURPRISE. ”
When I wrote this, he made a total of 4,426 videos. For comparison, with so many views - Justin Bieber’s official channel has over 10 billion views, while YouTube’s full-time star PewDiePie has almost 12 billion views - it’s likely that this person makes a living with a pair of gently muttering hands that spread their eggs Kinder. (Surprise-egg videos are accompanied by prerolls, and sometimes midrolls and commercials.)
This should give you some idea of how strange the world of online children's videos is, and this list of videos hints at the extreme scale and complexity of this situation. It looks harmless, but after a couple of minutes you will realize that this is part of some rather strange garbage.
Another huge image, especially for the youngest children, is children's rhymed videos.
Little Baby Bum , who made the aforementioned video, is YouTube ’s 7th most popular channel . In just 515 videos, they scored 11.5 million subscribers and 13 billion views . Again, there are questions regarding the accuracy of these numbers that I will receive soon, but the key point is that this is a huge, huge network and industry.
Video is a decoy for parents and for children, and therefore for content creators and advertisers. Young children are mesmerized by these videos, whether they are familiar characters and songs, or simply vibrant colors and soothing sounds. The duration of many of these videos is one common goal of the video is to collect many poems for children or cartoons into watch collections - and thus the length is positioned as part of the appeal of the video, indicating the amount of time some children spend with it.
In this way, YouTube channel presenters have developed a huge number of tactics to draw the attention of parents and children to their videos, as well as the advertising revenue that accompanies them. The first of these tactics is simply copying and piracy of other content. A simple Peppa Pig search on YouTube in my case yielded “about 10.4 million results”, the first page consists almost entirely of videos from the official Peppa Pig Official Channel, and one of the videos from an unofficial channel called Play Go Toys, which you really wouldn't notice if you weren't looking for it:
Play Go Toys Channelconsists of (I suppose?) pirated content Peppa Pig and other cartoons, videos with toys anboxing (another magnet for children) and, presumably, videos with the channel’s own children. I am not saying anything bad about Play Go Toys; I’m just showing how YouTube’s structure facilitates the stratification of content and the author, and how it affects our awareness and trust in its source.
As another blogger notesOne of the traditional roles of branded content is that it is a trusted source. Whether it’s Peppa Pig on the children's channel or Disney films, whatever the feelings for the industrial model of entertainment production are, they are carefully thought out and controlled so that the children are essentially safe to watch and trust them. This no longer works when the brand and the content are not connected by the platform, and the well-known and reliable content provides a seamless gateway for unverified and potentially harmful content.
(Yes, this is the same process as bundling reliable media in Facebook feeds and Google results, which are currently causing such damage to our educational and political systems, and I will not explicitly study these relations further now, but this is obviously of great importance.) The
second way to increase the number of video views is through a keyword / hashtag association, which itself in itself is a whole dark art. When a trend, such as Surprise Egg videos, reaches a critical mass, content producers fall on it, creating hundreds and thousands of these videos in any possible quantity. This is the source of all the strange names in the list above: branded content and the names of nursery rhymes and “surprise egg”, all stuffed into a salad of similar words to capture search results, placement on the side panels and an “up” rating for auto play.
A prime example of weirdness is the Finger Family video (a harmless example, pasted above). I have no idea where they came from, and about the origin of the nursery rhyme at the heart of the images, but there are at least 17 million versions on YouTube , and they again cover all possible genres: with a total of billions of views.
Again, the number of views on these videos should have been taken seriously under control. A huge number of these videos are mainly created by bots and viewed by bots, and even commented on by bots. This is a whole strange world in itself. But you should not hide that there are also many real children immersed in iPhones and tablets, watch it again and again - in part, given the increased number of views - they are taught to type basic search terms in the browser or simply scroll through the sidebar to include another video.
What I find somewhat disturbing about the distribution of ordinary (relatively) normal children's videos is the inability to determine the degree of automation that works here; how to understand the gap between man and machine. The example above, from a channel called Bounce Patrol Kids, with nearly two million subscribers, demonstrates this effect in action. They publish professionally created videos, with real actors, about one video per week. Once again, I am not saying anything bad about Bounce Patrol, which clearly follows in the footsteps of pre-digital childhood sensations, like their Australian counterparts The Wiggles .
And yet there is something strange about a group of people who endlessly act regardless of the combination of algorithmically generated keywords: “Halloween Finger Family & more Halloween Songs for Children | Kids Halloween Songs Collection ”,“ Australian Animals Finger Family Song | Finger Family Nursery Rhymes ”,“ Farm Animals Finger Family and more Animals Songs | Finger Family Collection - Learn Animals Sounds ”,“ Safari Animals Finger Family Song | Elephant, Lion, Giraffe, Zebra & Hippo! Wild Animals for kids ”,“ Superheroes Finger Family and more Finger Family Songs! Superhero Finger Family Collection ”,“ Batman Finger Family Song - Superheroes and Villains! Batman, Joker, Riddler, Catwoman ”on and on. This is the production of content in the era of algorithmic discovery - even if you are a person,
Other channels abandoned the real actors to create endless reconfigurable versions of the same videos over and over again. What happens here is clearly automated. Stock animations, audio tracks, and thousands of keyword lists create an endless stream of video. The aforementioned channel, Videogyan 3D Rhymes - Nursery Rhymes & Baby Songs , posts a few videos a week, using more byzantine in keyword combinations. They have almost five million subscribers - twice as many as Bounce Patrol - although I will say it again - it is impossible to find out who or what is actually doing these millions and millions of views.
I try not to turn this essay into an endless list of examples, but it’s important to understand how extensive this system is and how vague its actions, process and audience are. It is also international in nature: there are variations of the Finger Family and Learn Colors videos for Tamil epics and Malaysian cartoons , which are unlikely to appear in search results in the English version. This uncertainty and reach are key to its existence and its consequences. Its dimension makes understanding difficult.
We came across very obvious examples of the alarming results of full automation before that - some of them were fortunately left with dark humor, others - not so many. Much has been done with the help of algorithmic crossings of stock photo libraries and at the request of production, everything from T-shirts to mugs, from baby overalls to phone cases. The above example, available until recently on Amazon, is one such case, and the story of how it happened is fascinating and strange, but essentially understandable.. No one was going to create phone cases with drugs and medical equipment on them, it was just a very strange mathematical / probabilistic result. The fact that it took some time to notice can cause some disturbing calls.
Similarly, the “Keep Calm and Rape A Lot” T-shirt label(along with Keep Calm and Knife Her and Keep Calm and Hit Her) is depressing and sad, but it’s pretty clear that no one was going to create these shirts: they simply linked an uncontrolled list of verbs and pronouns using an online image generator. It is possible that not one of these T-shirts that ever physically existed was ever bought or worn, and therefore there was no harm. And again, the people creating this content did not notice, and the distributor did nothing. They literally had no idea what they were doing .
What I will argue about on the basis of these cases and those that I will discuss later is that the scope and logic of the system are accomplices of these results and require us to analyze their consequences.
(And again: I’m not going to delve into the broader social consequences of such processes beyond what I am writing about here, but it’s clear that a clear line can be drawn from such examples as pressing contemporary issues such as racial and gender bias in large data systems and machine systems that require urgent attention, but in the same way have nothing like simple or even preferred solutions.)
Let's look at only one video among a pile of video for children and try to figure out where it comes from come from. It is important to emphasize that I was not going to find this video: it turned out to be higher in rating when searching for “finger family” in incognito mode(that is, it should not be affected by a previous search). This automation leads us to very, very strange places, and at this moment the rabbit hole is so deep that it is impossible to understand how it happened.
Once again, a warning about the content: this video is not entirely inappropriate, but it is clearly disabled and contains elements that may bother someone. It is very soft on the scale of such things, but. I write it below if you do not want to watch it and follow this road. This warning will be repeated.
The above video is called Wrong Heads Disney Wrong Ears Wrong Legs Kids Learn Colors Finger Family 2017 Nursery Rhymes . The name confirms its automatic origin. I have no idea where the expression “Wrong Heads” comes from, but I can imagine that, like with the Finger Family song, somewhere there is a completely original and harmless version of which the children laughed after it, processed by the algorithm, turned into a list of words that are incoherent with each other, combined with Learn Colors, Finger Family and Nursery Rhymes, and all these combinations - not just like words, but like images, processes and actions - are mixed with what we see here.
The video consists of the usual version of the Finger Family song, performed over an animation of the changing and intersecting heads and bodies of characters from Disney Aladin. Again, this is strange, but frankly, no more than Surprise Egg videos or anything else that children watch. I understand how innocent it is. The discrepancy is accompanied by the appearance of a non-Aladdin character - Agni, the little girl from Despicable Me. Agnes is the arbiter of the scene: when the heads do not match, she cries, when they match, she rejoices.
The creator of the video, BABYFUN TV (screenshot above), has released many similar videos. Like many of the videos with the wrong connecting heads that I could watch, they worked exactly the same. Cartoon character Puzzle cries when changing heads of Trolls and Smurfsbetween themselves. It goes on and on. I see this as a game, but the constant overlapping and mixing of different types gradually penetrates into us. BABYFUN TV has only 170 subscribers and a very low number of views, but there are thousands and thousands of such channels. The numbers in this long tail are inconsequential in the abstract sense, but their number is essential .
The question arises: how did this happen? The image of “Bad Baby”, also present on the BABYFUN channel, has the same cry. While I find it disturbing, I can understand that it can provide some rhythm or attitude to their own experience, because real children are involved in the content of the video. Although it was stretched and distorted by algorithmic repetition and recombination in such a way that I do not think anyone wants this to happen to him.
Toy Freaks is an extremely popular channel ( 68th on the platform ) in which the father and his two daughters act out - or, in some cases, possibly behave like in life - like many of the images we've highlighted before, including “Bad Baby,” above. Like nursery rhymes and teaching flowers, Toy Freaks specializes in abusive situations, as well as other genres, many people watching this channel are on the verge of their indignation if they do not go beyond it, seeing a video with how children behave disgustingly, Toy Freaks Is a YouTube-approved channel, no matter what it means. (I think we know that now this does not mean anything ).
As in the case of Bounce Patrol Kids, you feel that the content of these videos is impossible to understand, it is impossible to figure out where the meaning begins and ends, who comes up with ideas and who plays them. In turn, the images in popular human-led channels, such as Toy Freaks, lead to the fact that they are endlessly repeated over the network in ever more outlandish forms.
This is the next level of video, described by me as a video involving people who are basically much more anxious than the unpleasant actions of Toy Freaks and their relatives. Here is a relatively mild but still frustrating example:
Going beyond just the pirated Peppa Pig videos mentioned earlier is an insult. They also abound in violence. Peppa really goes to the dentist in the official Peppa Pig commercials, and the episode in which she does this seems popular - although it is unclear what seems like a real episode is available only on an unofficial channel. In the official version, Peppa was reassured by a gracious dentist. In the version above, she is mostly tortured before becoming a series of Iron Man robots and performing Learn Colors dances. The search “Peppa Pig at the Dentist” returns the aforementioned video on the first page, this only worsens the situation.
Shocking videos with Peppa Pig, which tend to extreme violence and fear, with Peppa eating her father orDrinking bleach are, as it turned out, very common. They make up the whole YouTube subculture. Many, obviously, skits or even satires in themselves, are quite common on the Internet and are intentionally done in an offensive and outrageous style. In all 4chan communities, there is a mockery of the video data, we know that.
In the example above, the type is less clear: the video starts with a mockery of Peppa, but later mixes with automatic repetition of the images that we recently saw. I do not know which camp this belongs to. Maybe it's just a parody of such cartoons, I hope so, but I'm not sure. Parodies do not cover the intersection of real actors and more automatic examples further down the line. They play here but that’s not all.
I believe it would be naive not to see the intentions of these versions, but many of them are so close to the original, and therefore not indicated - as an example of a dentist - of which there are many, many children look at them. I understand that most of them do not try to confuse children, even if it seems so.
I try to understand why, if this is a problem, why the question "Does anyone think about children?" Obviously, this content is inappropriate, it’s obvious that the actors are bad, it’s obvious that most of these videos should be removed. Obviously, this also raises questions about the legality of use, appropriation, free speech, etc.
But reports that simply explain the problem through pink glasses cannot fully understand what mechanisms are unfolding, and therefore are not able to think about the consequences of what this could lead to to take appropriate measures.
The New York Times titled its article on this issue as “On YouTube Kids , a shocking video slipped past the filters,” which emphasizes the use of fake characters and nursery rhymes in prohibited content, and urges that this be considered as a problem in the work of moderators and the law. YouTube Kids, the official app that claims to be safe for the baby, but is obviously a problem, because it fraudulently generates trust in users. An article in the British The Sun:“Children who remained injured after sick YouTube videos showing Peppa Pig characters with knives and shotguns that appeared in the application for children,” also took the right side, adding a dose of technophobia and self-righteousness. But both stories assume YouTube’s fundamental claims that such videos are incredibly rare and quickly deleted: Statements are completely refuted by the spread of the stories themselves and the growing number of posts on social networks, mainly from interested parents from whom they arise.
But, as is the case with Toy Freaks, what concerns me with Peppa videos is how obvious skits and even darker fakes interact with legions of algorithmic content developers until it's completely impossible to find out what is happening. (“The creatures from the outside looked like a pig to a man, and from a man to a pig and from a pig to a man again, but it's impossible to say what it was.”)
This is what the version of Toy Freaks released in Asia is (screenshot above). Here is one from Russia. I really do not want to use the term “human-led” for these videos anymore, although they contain all the same images and actual people who violate them. I don’t know what is going on here anymore, and I really don’t want this, and I start to think that this is a kind of point. This is part of why I'm starting to think about the awareness of all this. A lot of effort has been put into creating this. And brings more revenue than spam - right? Who writes these scripts while editing these videos? Once again I want to emphasize: this is still very soft, even funny material compared to what is there.
Here are a few things that really bother me:
First is the level of fear and violence. This is offensive for a while; most of the time he seems deeper and more unconscious. The Internet has a way of enhancing and embodying many of our hidden desires; in fact, this is what seems best done. I spend a lot of time discussing this trend with regard to human sexual freedom, personality, and other issues. Here, and overwhelmingly, one sometimes feels that this tendency is itself brutal and destructive.
Secondly, levels of use, not children, because they are children, but children, because they are helpless to suggestion. Automated reward systems, such as YouTube’s algorithms, require use just as capitalism needs to consume materials, and if you are someone who opposes the second half of this equation, then perhaps this should be what convinces you of it the truth. Operation is encoded in the systems that we build, which complicates the work, it is more difficult to think and understand what we should fight against and what to defend against. AI lords and robots in factories are not somewhere in the future, but right here, now, on your screen, in your living room and in your pocket.
Many of these latest examples contradict any attempt to claim that no one actually watches these videos, that these are all bots. People are involved in this chain, at least on the production side, and I am also very worried about them.
I have written enough, too much, but I feel that I really need to justify all this nonsense about violence and abuse and automated systems with an example that sums it up. Maybe, after all that I said, you will not think that everything is so bad. Personally, I do not know what to think next.
This video, the BURIED ALIVE Outdoor Playground Finger Family Song Nursery Rhymes Animation Education Learning Video , contains all the elements that we reviewed above and takes them to a different level. Familiar characters, children's images, verbal nonsense, full automation, violence, as well as the worst desires of children. And, of course, a huge number of these videos. Channel after channel after channel of similar content, each month is released at the speed of hundreds of new videos. Industrial production of nightmares.
Recently: there is more violent and sexier content like this. I am not going to refer to it. I do not believe in the trauma of ordinary people, but you need to continue to emphasize this, and not deny the psychological effect on children of things that are not clearly disturbing for adults, just incredibly absurd and strange.
A friend who works on digital video told me what needs to be done to create something like this: a small studio of people (half a dozen, maybe more), making large amounts of low-quality content to generate advertising revenue, disabling certain requirements systems (in particular, to some extent, duration). According to my friend, children's online content is one of the few alternative ways to make money from 3D animation, due to the low quality standards of animation, and the emphasis is on quantity. It uses existing and easily accessible content (for example, character models and motion capture libraries), and it can be repeated and revised endlessly and mostly meaningless because the algorithms do not distinguish - and children too.
These videos, wherever they are made, they are created, and regardless of the conscious intention (that is, to accumulate revenue from advertising), they use a system that was originally intended to show videos for children, for profit. Unconsciously created, they leave the result of their work everywhere.
We are not talking about the controversial, but undoubtedly the real consequences of violence in movies or video games for teenagers, or about the consequences of pornography or extreme images for young minds that were mentioned in my introductory description of my own teenage use of the Internet. This is an important debate, but this is not what is being discussed here. We are talking about very young children, effective from birth, deliberately targeting content that will hurt and bother them, through networks that are extremely vulnerable to this particular form of violence. This is not about trolls, but about a kind of violence inherent in the combination of digital systems and capitalist incentives. It drops to iron level.
My point of view: The system is responsible for the misuse of these materials.
And right now, right here, YouTube and Google are partners in this system. The architecture that they built to maximize the revenue from online videos used by individuals who are unaware of the harm done to children may not even be intentional, but on a massive scale. I believe that they are fully responsible for this, as they are responsible for the radicalization of (mostly) young (mostly) men through extremist videos - any political beliefs. They still have not shown absolutely no tendency to this, which in itself is despicable. However, a huge part of my troubling answer to this question is that I have no idea how they can respond without shutting down the service itself, and most systems that resemble it. We created a world which works on a scale where human control is simply impossible, and no inhumane measure will oppose most of the examples I used in this essay. The fears that I left in parentheses everywhere, if raised for general discussion, would allow me to rewrite everything I said with minimal effort, not about child abuse, but about white nationalism, about violent religious ideologies, about fake news , about climate denial, about the 9/11 conspiracy.
This is a very dark time when the structures that we created for ourselves are used against us - all of us - in a systematic and automated way. It is difficult to maintain faith in the network when it produces such horrors. Although I want to reject the wilder examples as simple ridicule, of which, of course, a significant figure, does not take into account the sheer volume of content, weighted in a particularly grotesque direction. It presents many complex and hidden dangers, including the fact that, like increasing attention to Russia's alleged interference in social networks, such events will be used as an excuse to strengthen control over the Internet, increase censorship, etc. This is not what most of us would like.
I will stop here, talking only about this:
It’s not just child abuse that bothers me, although it directly concerns me. My opinion is that this is just one aspect of a kind of infrastructural violence committed by all of us all the time, and we are still trying to find a way to talk about it, to describe the mechanisms of its work and the consequences. As I said at the beginning of this essay: this is done by people, technologies, and a combination of technologies and people. It is impossible to shift the responsibility for its results to someone, but the damage is very, very real.
Translation: Vyacheslav Bukatov