youtubekids

Do You Know What YouTube Is Showing Your Kids?

November 19, 2021 by JasonStewart

Who (or what) makes the content your kids watch on YouTube? In some cases, it’s hard-working creators who strive to make quality videos for entertainment or education. In other cases, it’s a computer program designed to efficiently produce videos for a lot of views and big profit. With this in mind, it is up to parents to ensure that their kids have a safe and fun experience while online. For helpful and empowering tools to establish a safe screen home environment, check out our Screen Safety Essentials Course. Today’s GKIS article tells you what you need to know to make YouTube viewing safer for your kids.

Bots!

Bots are computer programs designed by people or other bots to carry out specific online tasks. Not all bots are bad. However, they can run without any oversight from an actual human being.

One application for bots is creating YouTube videos for kids. More specifically, in this capacity bots combine video segments and post them over and over to test how many views they get. Once the tests are completed, the bot has created and run videos that ultimately make money for the programmer. Now that’s artificial intelligence!

Bot-Made Videos

Bot-made videos can look like a normal kid’s video, but they are typically a bit stranger. They often contain just enough story to string the randomly chosen segments together, but not enough story for everything happening to make logical sense. There are just enough familiar elements to hold a child’s attention but nothing educational or valuable to a child.

These videos distract kids long enough to get them to view ads and may even cause harm. After all, many times a human’s eyes have not viewed the video, and bots can’t discriminate a harmful video from a harmless one. At a glance, parents can’t discriminate either. Plus, most parents simply don’t take the time to preview thousands of videos their kids browse each day – especially from beginning to end.

Using Branded Characters to Bail Kids

One element that gets kids searching and watching are recognizable characters. Although branded characters are used without permission and are placed in a disjointed storyline for the video, kids will select them and stay entrapped expecting entertainment. For example, in her book Screen Time in the Mean Time, Dr. Bennett describes an alarming video portraying popular kid’s cartoon character, Peppa the Pig, screaming while being tortured in a dentist’s chair. The beginning of the video looks like a regular Peppa the Pig story. But near the middle of it, the story takes a confusing, terrible turn. Inappropriate video content make be shocking and even funny to older kids but vulnerable young children don’t have the insight or sophisticated skill set to look away. This can feel like a violent ambush and result in confusion, shame, and trauma.

Auto-play

Kids don’t always view these videos because they searched out the characters. Sometimes it is offered to them automatically in their feed. Auto-play is a YouTube feature where a new video is automatically

started after the one currently playing ends. Auto-play will select a video that is similar to the one you just watched based on tags that content creators mark their videos with when they post them. If auto-play is left on too long, it can lead a viewer down a rabbit hole of similar but stranger and stranger videos until they fall into bot-generated content.

The Algorithm

Unfortunately, bot-made videos and more can slip onto YouTube relatively easily. The huge volume of content uploaded to YouTube every day means that having a human being review every video uploaded to the site would be impossible. Instead, YouTube has another way to filter the content uploaded to its site, a bot of their own.

YouTube’s algorithm is, in essence, a much more advanced form of a bot that can scan through every video as it’s uploaded and automatically flag anything that violates YouTube’s terms of service, or at least that’s what it’s supposed to do. Unfortunately, YouTube’s algorithm can’t detect every inconsistency. It’s looking for the very specific things it was programmed to look for. Videos that don’t contain these specific violations slip by the filters. Many content creators have learned what exactly the algorithm is looking for, and some of them use it to slip inappropriate content past the sensors.

YouTube’s algorithm is also responsible for other features on the site including auto-play. The algorithm is what decides what’s worth showing next after a video, and what isn’t. However, the algorithm is only capable of discerning what videos are similar to others based on the tags assigned to a video. If a bot learns to place all the relevant tags for child content on an automatically generated video, then the algorithm will suggest it as if it were normal child content.

What can you do about bot content?

There are a few things that you as a parent can do to protect your children from bot-generated content:

Check in on your kids when they’re watching YouTube

So you can be sure the algorithm hasn’t drifted too far away from where it started.

Get Help

Monitoring everything your child watches can be a daunting task GKIS is here to help. Our Social Media Readiness Course is designed to teach your tweens or teens how to spot red flags on social media sites and when they’re gaming.

Turn off auto-play

The auto-play feature can be disabled by clicking the auto-play button at the bottom of YouTube videos. The button appears as a small black and white play button and is replaced by a black and white pause button while disabled. By turning off this feature, YouTube will no longer pick the next video your child watches next and instead will wait for you to manually choose the next video.

Limit your child’s time on YouTube

The bot-generated content of YouTube is at the bottom of the algorithm’s list of choices. Children often end up being presented with bot-generated content after spending too much time watching videos on YouTube. Our Connected Family Course has screen management strategies and safe-screen home setup ideas to help you manage your child’s screen time.

If you do catch your kids being exposed to an inappropriate video, report it.

Videos reported to YouTube as inappropriate are reviewed by real people who can catch the video for what it is. An offending video will be deleted permanently and can get the channel it comes from deleted entirely.

Thanks to CSUCI intern, Jason T. Stewart for researching bot-generated content and co-authoring this article.

I’m the mom psychologist who will help you GetKidsInternetSafe.

Onward to More Awesome Parenting,

Tracy S. Bennett, Ph.D.
Mom, Clinical Psychologist, CSUCI Adjunct Faculty
GetKidsInternetSafe.com

Works Cited

Robertson, Adi. “What makes YouTube’s surreal kids’ videos so creepy” The Verge, https://www.theverge.com/culture/2017/11/21/16685874/kids-youtube-video-elsagate-creepiness-psychology

Maheshwari, Sapna. “On YouTube Kids, Startling Videos Slip Past Filters” NY Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-kids-paw-patrol.html

Oremus, Will. “Even YouTube’s service for kids is being abused. Can anything control the massive platforms that now shape our lives?” Slate, https://slate.com/technology/2017/11/those-disturbing-youtube-videos-for-kids-are-a-symptom-of-techs-scale-problem.html

Photo Credits

Photo By: Kaufdex (https://pixabay.com/photos/youtube-media-screen-mac-apple-2449144/)

Photo By: Gerd Altmann (https://pixabay.com/illustrations/binary-one-cyborg-cybernetics-1536624/)

Photo By: Gerd Altmann (https://pixabay.com/photos/hacker-attack-mask-internet-2883632/)

Photo By: Markus Trier (https://pixabay.com/photos/homeschooling-school-technology-5121262/)

Is YouTube Still Targeting Your Kids?

October 29, 2021 by JasonStewart

In 2019, YouTube was fined 170 million dollars for illegally advertising to kids. In this article, we’ll cover how YouTube broke the law designed to offer protection for children online, what they did to fix it, and the gap that still puts kids at risk.

To help protect your kids from inappropriate content on the internet, check out our Screen Safety Essential Course. This program offers access to weekly parent and family-oriented coaching videos that will help you to create safer screen home environments and foster open communication all while connecting and having fun as a family. Dr. Bennett’s coaching helps parents make more informed decisions about internet safety and educates families so they can use good judgment when encountering risks online.

What is COPPA?

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) requires websites to get parent’s permission before collecting identifying data (like a kid’s name or address) or the cookies from the computer the child is using for children 13 and under. Cookies is a term for a type of data packet sent from a website to a computer and the computer returns the packet to the website. These data packets are a way for websites to track a user and record their actions on the site. Any company caught violating COPPA may be fined up to a maximum of $42,530 per violation.

COPPA applies to any website that is aimed at children or has an audience that can include children such as:

PBS Kids
Sesame Street
Nickelodeon
Cartoon Network

How did YouTube break the law?

In 2015 YouTube created a secondary website and app called YouTube Kids dedicated to content for children ages 12 and under. YouTube makes the bulk of their revenue by selling ads and gathering customer data. Customer data is valuable to marketers because it helps them better target advertisements. YouTube Kids gathered child customer data using cookies without parent permission. This was a violation of COPPA. As a result, YouTube received a fine of 170 million dollars.

YouTube marketed itself to advertisers on its popularity with children and made millions of dollars on the subsequent revenue. This led to a surge in kid-oriented content creators who made quick and easy-to-produce videos to capitalize on the profitability of these new advertisers. For example, toy unboxing videos became popular because it was an easy to produce video that generated a lot of views. These content creators are also violators of COPPA because they capitalized on YouTube’s violation for profit.

What has YouTube changed?

The good news is that YouTube no longer collects your children’s personal identifiers and will not allow advertisements that attempt to collect them either. YouTube along with the FTC have also cracked down on content creators who intentionally abused the ad revenue system by mass producing content while YouTube was still collecting kid’s data. Those channels were reported by YouTube, reviewed by the FTC, and channels found guilty were then fined for their own COPPA violation.

YouTube also has guidelines to limit what can be advertised to children. For example, YouTube does not allow advertising of any kind of food or beverage to children. YouTube has also added content filters that are meant to catch content that is oriented at kids and ensure that any advertisement that can collect your data can’t show up on those videos.

But kids are still viewing inappropriate content

The bad news is that the YouTube advertisement system isn’t perfect. YouTube may not be able to target advertisements at your child specifically anymore, but they can still target advertisements at children using videos marked as for children on their main site, or using their secondary site YouTube Kids. YouTube has extra guidelines for kid-oriented advertisements. However, YouTube does not regulate video content in the same way they regulate advertisements. For example, YouTube won’t allow a thirty second ad about Kool-Aid on their platform if it’s aimed at kids, but Kool-Aid can make a channel and post videos that are essentially an advertisement dressed up like an entertaining video for children. If you’d like to learn more about how advertising affects your children, GKIS already has an article detailing just that linked here.

What does this mean for your child on YouTube?

YouTube has put better practices into place after the COPPA fine. That doesn’t mean that their business model is any different. YouTube is still a website that makes the majority of its money off of advertisements. The website may not be collecting your child’s data but their attention is still a commodity being sold. Content on YouTube can be fun and even educational for children, but you have to be careful of what content your kids are watching.

What can you do to protect your kids on YouTube?

Check what your kids are watching

If you check in on what your child is watching every few videos then you can be sure that they haven’t slipped into watching advertisements dressed up as videos.

Familiarize yourself with your child’s favorite creators

Check a couple of their videos and make sure their content is something you want your child to watch. It will also allow you to be sure this content creator isn’t advertising anything to your children in their videos.

GKIS how to spot marketing supplement

Here at GKIS our how to spot marketing supplement will help teach your kids about the strategies marketers use, and will help them identify when a video is really an advertisement in disguise.

GKIS social media readiness course

Bennett’s social media readiness course helps to teach your kids how to be safe online and recognize the risks on social media sites and found in gaming.

Thanks to CSUCI intern, Jason T. Stewart for researching YouTube’s COPPA fine and co-authoring this article.

I’m the mom psychologist who will help you GetKidsInternetSafe.

Onward to More Awesome Parenting,

Tracy S. Bennett, Ph.D.
Mom, Clinical Psychologist, CSUCI Adjunct Faculty
GetKidsInternetSafe.com

Works Cited

“Google and YouTube Will Pay Record $170 Million for Alleged Violations of Children’s Privacy Law” FTC, https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2019/09/google-youtube-will-pay-record-170-million-alleged-violations

“What are cookies” Norton, https://us.norton.com/internetsecurity-privacy-what-are-cookies.html

Stuart Cobb, “It’s Coppa-cated: Protecting Children’s Privacy in the Age of YouTube” Houston Law Review, https://houstonlawreview.org/article/22277-it-s-coppa-cated-protecting-children-s-privacy-in-the-age-of-youtube

“Advertising on YouTube Kids” Google, https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6168681?hl=en

Photo Credits

Photo by Tymon Oziemblewski from Pixabay

(https://pixabay.com/photos/youtube-laptop-notebook-online-1158693/)