Sarah Lim, Author at Goody Feed

An open question to parents: How many of you let your children use the Internet unsupervised for hours at a time? Children need non-stop care and entertainment, especially for the first 6-8 years of their life. This is an issue every caregiver and parent has to contend with, and one that can be pretty difficult to manage. Entertainment for Children Ever since the dawn of the television, and especially children's television programmes, parenting has taken the turn for the easier. With a screen that provides literally hours of entertainment, parents have a free baby sitter their kids willingly sit quietly in front of, freeing up precious time for themselves. With the Internet and handheld devices, this baby sitter has become a super portable, 24/7 presence that not only provides shows, but nearly unlimited access to games, videos and other applications from around the world. After all, every parent nowadays has heard of "Baby Shark" because it's also known as the "song that shut your kids up". It's also a fantastic distraction that can be conveniently used in times of need, such as when your child goes to the dentist, or to the barber. Of course, most parents take measures to ensure as much as possible that their children are only accessing child-safe content. One such measure is using the child-friendly version of the popular video platform YouTube, YouTube Kids. Yet, a few parents have discovered that YouTube Kids isn't as safe as we all thought. Here's Why Image: Apple iTunes Recently, a mother was using YouTube Kids to entertain her child while she attended to his nosebleed when she saw something alarming. Four minutes and forty-five seconds into the cartoon her child was watching, a man walks into the frame. Holding an imaginary blade and pretending to cut the inside of his arm, he explains, "Remember kids. Sideways for attention. Longways for results." If you're not aware of what it means, he's telling them how to harm themselves. Then he walks off. The video has since been taken down and can no longer be viewed. Outrage From Parents The mother understandably responded with much shock and disgust. She shared her experience on the Internet and called for friends and family to report the video. She says: "This video was intentionally planted on YouTube Kids to harm our children. He waited until parents’ guards were down, thinking their kids were just watching a harmless cartoon when he made his entrance four minutes and forty-five seconds into this video." It took a week for YouTube Kids to take the video down, making worried parents wonder how many other children have seen the video. Since then, it has been noted that this short clip has been spliced into several more videos from YouTube Kids and the Nintendo game Splatoon on Youtube. Since this incident has come to light, there has been much outrage from parents and child health experts. Free Hess, a paediatrician and mother who has been actively blogging about this issue, notes that she has been seeing an increasing number or children with self-harm issues and suicide attempts over the years. "I don't doubt that social media and things such as this is contributing," she says. Hess further explored the Youtube Kids platform and discovered more appalling content. She found videos promoting suicide, gun violence, sexual abuse and exploitation, human trafficking and domestic violence. Image: SayingImages.com Videos that should not be there at all. What's YouTube Kids anyway? YouTube Kids is the child-friendly version of YouTube, the highly popular video sharing platform that allows any and everyone to upload videos to the Internet. Currently, YouTube is the world's second most popular search engine behind Google. People search for everything on YouTube, from "How to fix a broken door" to their favourite songs. YouTube Kids' website states, "We created YouTube Kids to make it safer and simpler for kids to explore the world through online video". It provides parents with a host of parental controls to choose from. Parents can select the ages of their child, block certain content and even create kid-specific profiles so that the recommended videos and settings are catered to the individual child. Basically, YouTube Kids is meant to give children access to Internet videos and their parents a peace of mind at the same time. No System is Perfect However, YouTube Kids' website confessed: "... no system is perfect and inappropriate videos can slip through, so we’re constantly working to improve our safeguards and offer more features to help parents create the right experience for their families." With the discovery of such offensive content, parents just aren't sure if they can trust YouTube kids with their children anymore. The mother who originally discovered the self-harm and suicide video writes: "Those apps are all now deleted and will never return to our household." Hess called for stricter moderation and for the immediate removal of flagged and reported videos. YouTube has since responded with this statement: "We appreciate people drawing problematic content to our attention, and make it possible for anyone to flag a video. Flagged videos are manually reviewed 24/7 and any videos that don't belong in the app are removed." YouTube also assured parents that they are currently working on new software that allows parents to handpick videos for their children into the app. Recent New YouTube "Adpocalypse" In late 2016, the first YouTube "adpocalypse" occurred, whereby several big advertisers removed their ad spending on YouTube as they found their advertisements on hate contents. YouTube responded by removing many videos and channels, and demonetising a number of videos in a knee-jerk manner, leading many YouTubers to earn much lower than what they used to bring in. Advertisers slowly returned and the adpocalypse was deemed to be over until recently, when a YouTuber found out that YouTube were suggesting videos that featured young kids based on their algorithm. That's perfectly fine since some people like to watch kids, but some bad actors posted timestamps in the comment section that "freeze" at the exact moment when the kids are in compromising position, and according to the YouTuber, some comments even linked to sites that aren't exactly kid-friendly. The knee-jerk reaction from advertisers occurred again, and YouTube once again removed many channels and comments. At this moment, both YouTube and YouTubers alike are still in limbo on whether this could well be the second adpocalypse. Not a good day to be working in YouTube, I'd guess. Kid-Friendly or Kid-Unfriendly? Image: KK Tan / Shutterstock.com Of course, this issue raises important questions about the online content our children, and teenagers, are consuming. Besides YouTube, other popular platforms such as Netflix and Facebook also have kid-friendly versions which supposedly restrict certain kinds of content. But the discovery of such horrific video clips on YouTube Kids shows that even with much filtering, moderation and restriction, things can slip through the cracks. This begs the question: Can we truly trust our children with the Internet, even with the child-friendly versions? Which is Why Internet Moderation Isn't Enough Image: imtmphoto / Shutterstock.com This incident suggests that beyond just letting children learn from school and the Internet, perhaps it is time for parents to take a more active role in their children's lives. After all, in this age of unlimited access to information, it is impossible to stop children from ever coming across these kinds of content. Instead, a better approach could be for parents to have open conversations with their children about such issues—violence, suicide, self-harm and the like—so that when children inevitably encounter these things, they know how to appropriately respond.

Sarah Lim

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