The nightmare videos of childrens’ YouTube — and what’s wrong with the internet today | James Bridle

Writer and artist James Bridle uncovers a dark, strange corner of the internet, where unknown people or groups on YouTube hack the brains of young children in return for advertising revenue. From "surprise egg" reveals and the "Finger Family Song" to algorithmically created mashups of familiar cartoon characters in violent situations, these videos exploit and terrify young minds — and they tell us something about where our increasingly data-driven world is headed. "We need to stop thinking about technology as a solution to all of our problems, but think of it as a guide to what those problems actually are, so we can start thinking about them properly and start to address them," Bridle says.

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58 Comments on The nightmare videos of childrens’ YouTube — and what’s wrong with the internet today | James Bridle

    • I think flat earthers prove dumb people shouldn’t use the internet regardless of age… and kids are way more easily influenced… and flat earth is just the tip of the iceberg for how crazy some people can be… Kids and even adults without proper education and mental health can easily get sucked into a cult like flat earth. These people literally dedicate their entire lives to recruit more people to see their “truth” XD So even if some are stupid others will get better and better at making videos. They already have the formula “scare you, make you believe in something, oh you feel better now? that’s proof all our ideas are correct and has nothing to do with the fact blind faith and ignorance is bliss. A stupid person that is wrong 75% of the time but thinks they are right 100% of the time is 100% happy being wrong because they think they are right…

  1. Little kids shouldn’t be on the internet unsupervised anyway. Blame the parents and not the internet. They want censorship and control

    • yes, they usually give the child a cell phone, or the password to a device they can use for calling the parents, but the kids will usually get bored and wander into the internet

    • as a 70s child..but when all the people came online after 2000s .. when it was now ‘cool’ and wasn’t for geeks/nerds anymore.. this is where it took a very wrong turn.. why? You need to be at least 18 to own a gun and drink… but yet we don’t put that same restriction on the internet? Go watch a Simon Sinek YouTube video on millennials in the work place.. some actual meat of importance and sense he makes .. why do you think evil Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobbs never let their children on the internet until around 18?

    • +Morty Sanchez Your comment alone is utterly sad..and proves exactly why children should not be allowed on the internet until 18.

  2. Well, this TED Talk wasn’t expected at all, BUT it’s definitely an issue that has been here for a long time on YouTube

  3. Glad some mainstream person decided to pick this up, finally. Less popular people have only been discussing this topic for *2+ years.*

    • +Evil Genius97 If you got to use it without any restrictions this was still way too young. The worst things I’ve seen in my life I have seen on the internet. I found – and in many cases stumbled accross – them in ways a child this age could without any doubt as well.

    • +Evil Genius97 You need to be at least 18 to own a gun and drink… but yet we don’t put that same restriction on the internet? Go watch a Simon Sinek YouTube video on millennials in the work place.. some actual meat of importance and sense he makes .. why do you think evil Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobbs never let their children on the internet until around 18?

    • I grew up with the internet. It was pretty different in the early-mid 90’s, though.
      I was about 8 when I discovered the internet at a library. Pre-AOL, it was all knowledge sharing.
      Social media and entertainment ruins everything. 😛

    • +Star Gazer i know what you mean as a 70s child..but when all the people came online after 2000s .. when it was now ‘cool’ and wasn’t for geeks/nerds anymore.. this is where it took a very wrong turn.. why? You need to be at least 18 to own a gun and drink… but yet we don’t put that same restriction on the internet? Go watch a Simon Sinek YouTube video on millennials in the work place.. some actual meat of importance and sense he makes .. why do you think evil Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobbs never let their children on the internet until around 18?

    • +Just Your Average LA Socialist Might I remind you who is President :p lol. Maybe we’ll do better at choosing what’s important/popular once the reality TV generation is gone.

  4. He seems to present and describe a disquieting phenomenon very well, but then fails to pinpoint what exactly the ultimate problem with these wacky videos is, besides wasting so many hours with something so futile. And perhaps that is in itself the scariest thing about it all – and I write this as a father of two – that we don’t fully understand the impacts. But again, that is also the scariest thing about parenting sensu lato: the unknown impacts of your decisions as a parent.

    When in doubt, just give your kids a hug. We’re all mammals at any rate.

    • I was with you mostly until you brought in the fraud of evolution that we are mammals sigh..

      DNA vs evolution – Let me suggest that you present the facts concerning DNA. This is one of the simplest and most powerful proof of the necessity of an intelligent Creator that I know. Were he alive today, Darwin would be shocked to see his theory shattered by what has been recently discovered about DNA. We each begin as a single cell smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. Instructions for building the body are encoded in the DNA in an ingenious language that only certain protein molecules can decode and read. These words give that microscopic cell _(and all those it will produce)_ the instructions for constructing trillions of living cells out of nonliving materials and arranging them in the precise relationship with one another to eventually function as a living and breathing body for man. The ability of DNA to store information is so incredibly vast that were the contents of a mere pinhead’s-worth printed out in English, it would take a stack of books 500 times as high as the distance from earth to the moon to contain it. We don’t have computers that can come even close to that storing and processing power. Obviously, the DNA itself did not originate _(and can’t even read)_ the information it carries. Those words point irrefutably to an supra-intelligence/supra-intellect that alone could design the body. This “instruction manual” could not grow out of a series of fortuitous evolutionary chance developments over billions of years. Such a theory is totally unreasonable. Yet it is forced upon school children around the world by operational science hucksters, charlatans, defrauders, ultracrepidarianists, who are so insecure in what they believe that they will not allow an alternate view to be expressed.

  5. I think the best way to go about this is to just teach parents to not let their children use the internet unsupervised. But since that’s going to be nearly impossible to pull off (at least on a meaningful scale), I think that youtube should have a kids section where they handpick shows that are suited for children.

    • Steinchen drei von und zu vierzig that requires YouTube to hire people. YouTube doesn’t want to do that unfortunately. The only way I can think of getting around this is using a (raspberry) Pi-hole to block all ads and words from entering your home.

    • I think the biggest issue is the lack of “media competence”. This is something every parent or teacher should teach. The problem here is: most of them do not even know how to utilize media properly, so how can they possibly teach this? For example: most people do not understand the concept of “internet bubbles”, thou this is crucial knowledge.

      Back to topic: i cannot even remotely understand how someone could let toddlers use youtube or the internet in the first place. What the heck is wrong with you guys? 😉

    • You need to be at least 18 to own a gun and drink… but yet we don’t put that same restriction on the internet? Go watch a Simon Sinek YouTube video on millennials in the work place.. some actual meat of importance and sense he makes .. why do you think evil Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobbs never let their children on the internet until around 18?

  6. There are also narcissistic individuals that use clickbait tricks for attention even when the content isn’t monetized.

    • I never heard of Ali-A, but I checked one quick and immediately hit an ad.

      There are videos in abundance YouTube won’t monetize and the makers even brag about how it will get taken down because of “evil YouTube censorship”. These aren’t necessarily the children’s videos here.

      I’ve also seen how it looks like a good portion of the “fun” is to harass the critics that inevitably show up, thus giving them the attention they crave. And YouTube is pretty bad about taking their community guidelines strikes seriously. As evidenced by the number of likes to my original short post I sense others agree. It’s not just children’s videos, YT has a lot of crap that shouldn’t be there. Sifting through what is freedom of expression and what is in some way harmful is a nightmare for them.

    • Well weird people will always exist and you won’t be able to change that. I think a real human moderator should be able to regulate the importance of such people down.

    • I think non-monetized videos still help them build an audience that is going to subscribe and see the few monetized pieces of content they post.

  7. Those videos are actually really creepy. But I love how H3H3 Production pointed that out a year ago and tried to warn Youtube. Nobody reacted, until a view month later and this issue became trending, apparently only on the internet. As far as I remember no big german Newspaper was talking about it, even if it concerned our kids.
    But there is a big issuer: Apparently some of the comments, seem to be only some mess up of letters. But if you go through a pass of encrypting them, it showed messages which seem to be linked to pedophiles. Of course everybody was like: Why would they do this on Youtube?? It’s public!
    That’s the reason why. Nobody would expect this to be handled in public. The traffic on this website is to huge to monitor every single comment.

    But I’m happy that there was a TED talk in the right direction. Please take care of your kids, and look at what they are watching.

  8. Oh god, when the finger family video came up I could hear the song at the back of my mind.
    I have a nephew who watches these type of videos on end and I’ve long since had him on YouTube Kids rather than regular YouTube, he was emulating a lot of what he saw on those Peppa Pig, Elsa, Moana, Thomas, Spider-man videos (and you thought Infinity War was an ambitious crossover).

  9. As someone who doesn’t have kids, this is kind of morbidly funny to me.
    If I did have kids though… I’d keep them away from the internet.

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