YouTube Kids… Fraud?

   The internet may seem like it is a safe environment for children, especially when they have programs like YouTube Kids and Kiddle. Or they have kid-friendly websites such as CoolMathForKids, PBS kid games and many more. But what if they really aren’t safe for our children? What if they just convince parents that it is?

  There have been many theories on the fact that YouTube Kids is actually promoting violence, death, suicide, and so much more.

  YouTube Kids is a video app that provides a version YouTube for children, with curated selections of content, parental control features, and filtering of videos not deemed appropriate. This was supposed to be a safe way for children to get education and learn rather than be brainwashed.

  There have been many reports from parents about this problem. YouTube promotes such videos shown to children by using a child-friendly character that would seems disarming but make it into something more terrible than that.

  James Bridle, an artist, writer, and publisher for many companies like WIRED, Icon, Domus, Cabinet Magazine and many more, stated, “The way the company’s site is designed, it essentially encourages the production and posting of such videos.” This company really doesn’t care about these children and are allowing videos such as Elsa-gate to be accessible to them.

  The videos typically contain content such as abuse to kids, Paw Patrol characters attempting suicide, Peppa Pig being tricked into eating bacon (cannibalism), teen pregnancy, guns, drugs, and abortions. This is typically not something any child should see nor should they be encouraged to do.

  But why would they claim that this is a kid-friendly site with videos such as these? Even famous You Tuber Shane Dawson has gone over this theory and came up with a few ideas as well; although, it is not just him that has theories and ideas of what YouTube is really doing.

  People, including Dawson, suspect that it may be a way for population control, to ensure the violence that will lead to these children to do unthinkable things.

  A YouTube creator named Matt Watson flagged the issue in a Reddit post, saying he found scores of videos of kids where YouTube users are trading inappropriate comments and timestamps. He denounced the company for failure to prevent a “soft-core pedophilia ring” operating in plain sight.

   He created a video on YouTube, called “YouTube is Facilitating the Sexual Exploitation of Children, and it’s Being Monetized” created on February 18th, 2019 which has recently gained a lot of attention.

  The video demonstrated how YouTube  recommendation algorithms pushes users into a pedophilia “wormhole,” accusing the company of facilitating the sexual exploitation of children.

  The company then announced a policy that had changed kid videos. They stated that they would in fact “police” comments, any video with inappropriate comments will be turned off, and they will monitor the video content on YouTube Kids.

  Now, could they really not know that this content is on their site or that parents are complaining and reporting these videos which half the time don’t get taken down, or do they want to promote these things to children because they will make money off of it? Who knows? Maybe no one will ever know the truth behind this terrifying program that is supposed to be “safe.”