YouTube’s problem: Lots of ‘poop’ videos
Company to hire more reviewers to protect kids from inappropriate videos
LOS ANGELES – YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki was blunt about the extent of the situation. “Bad actors” are exploiting the YouTube system. The Google-owned company would hire more human reviewers to thwart those who try to “mislead, manipulate, harass or even harm.”
But spend a little time with YouTube and videos that kids might come across, and you’ll see she’s got a long way to go.
Just hours after Wojcicki’s late Monday blog post unveiling plans to increase the number of people reviewing YouTube’s video to 10,000 next year, a 25% increase, USA TODAY found dozens of videos that appeared to slip through filters designed to keep harmful, explicit content away from kids and young teens.
One trouble spot: A flourishing genre called “YouTube Poop,” where people take an existing, popular cartoon, such as Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob Square
Pants or Peppa Pig, or a scene from the Disney film Frozen, and record a new soundtrack with explicit sexual or violent themes.
Some were age-restricted, meaning they could only be viewed by signing in with a Google account, which is only available to those 13 years of age and up. If YouTube had identified the videos as adults-only, they should have barred anyone under 18.
But several others in this genre, with names such as “Joker has trouble braking his c--- s--ing habit,” based on the Batman nemesis, “Cedric Rapes Harry,” using footage from one of the films based on the children’s novels, and “YTP Peppa Pig Plays Sexual Games” did not carry any age-restriction prompt — meaning users under 18 could watch them.
In the past few months, media critics and child-welfare advocates have assailed YouTube, the world’s largest video network, for turning a blind eye to thousands of videos using kids-themed
content — or involving kids — that contain violence, are sexually explicit or exploit children.
Amid the backlash, YouTube has rolled out a series of changes, from tightening filters on what gets on its Kids app to who can watch videos on its main site.
Just before Thanksgiving, YouTube said in a statement to USA TODAY that it had implemented policies to age-restrict (only available to people over 18 and logged in) “content with family entertainment characters but containing mature themes or adult humor.”
After USA TODAY contacted YouTube about the adult-themed cartoons that were slipping through the age-restriction filter, the videos were flagged, or “age-gated” in YouTube’s terminology, and were restricted. The company on Tuesday said it will impose those age restrictions on adult-themed kids content “when flagged.”
“We are also ramping up our use of machine learning, so that we can better manage this content at scale,” it said. “Content that misleads or endangers children is unacceptable to us.”
Reliance on users and algorithms to alert YouTube to dangerous content has repeatedly come under fire in the past year, perhaps Wojcicki’s most daunting challenge to her leadership since being named CEO in February 2014.
That objectionable videos only get removed after they’ve been flagged is “not acceptable,” said Josh Golin, the executive director for advocacy group Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood. “My daughter has already seen it.”
YouTube, which receives 400 hours of new videos per minute, says increasingly sophisticated machine learning is necessary to counter the scale of video uploaded every day and that investing in the technology will make YouTube a safer place.
But under pressure from advertisers and child-safety advocates, it has acknowledged that its computer programs can’t do it all.
Advertisers last month pulled away from the service after news reports showed child predators using videos of young children as de facto pedophile chat rooms. Wojcicki in her blog post called 2017 a “very tough year.”
The ad boycott followed earlier reports of scary content seeping into YouTube Kids, started two years ago as a safe place for kids with a stand-alone mobile app. Critics have seized on YouTube for allowing some of the non-kidfriendly content from appearing there as well. This week, USA TODAY found a video in the app of an elephant killing a security guard in India.
On YouTube, unlike Facebook or Twitter, anyone with a great idea who is savvy at producing video can quit their day jobs and make a handsome living producing videos for YouTube.
YouTube splits ad revenues 55%
45% with the creator, who gets rewarded for the clicks. The more eyeballs, the greater the checks. According to Forbes, the five YouTubers with the largest audiences earned a collective $43.5 million in 2016.
In the past two years, a new genre of programming on YouTube has emerged, focusing on even younger children: the 3- to 6-year-old set. Now, those kids channels are the most popular genre on YouTube, despite YouTube’s terms of service that ban kids younger than 13 from watching.
Four of the top five YouTube channels in the U.S. are kid-related, according to measurement service Tubular Labs, highlighted by Ryan Toys Review
(719 million views in October), in which a 5-year-old kid reviews toys, or ToyScouter (457 million views), featuring kids singing nursery rhymes.
These channels are clean. It’s the sub-genres, such as “Poop,” where YouTube gets into trouble. A youngster might land upon a sexualized video of Mickey Mouse if his viewing history contains Mikey Mouse and it hasn’t been flagged as age-restricted.
“These kinds of mash-ups seem funny and ironic to adults who create them, but to a child they can be disturbing and confusing,” says Michael Rich, an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard University.