YouTube For Kids: Eerie, Violent, And Made By Bots

Children and adolescents are often left to run rampant on the internet. But what are they looking at, how is content being marketed to them? 

In this polemic, James Bridle, an artist and writer, explains how kid-targeted content online is generated and distributed via algorithms. From his deep research into “Kids' YouTube,” he concludes that the structures of the (whole) internet are fundamentally rotten. 

“Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level.”

Bridle begins by showing some more benign, if strange videos, such as those showing unboxing toys or cracking open Kinder Eggs, which have thousands of views. No problem here, right?

Then things get weirder: like the “Finger Family” videos, where each finger of a hand sings a creepy, nonsensical song. It turns out that much media like this is actually created by bots, based on keywords from other content that has been viewed and liked. 

When content is generated by algorithms, bizarre and scary combinations occur, the beginnings of which can be seen in “wrong heads” videos where characters' disembodied heads float around looking for a match. Other videos “teem with violence” generated from recombinant keywords and tropes.

“What we’re talking about is very young children, effectively from birth, being deliberately targeted with content which will traumatise and disturb them, via networks which are extremely vulnerable to exactly this form of abuse. It’s not about trolls, but about a kind of violence inherent in the combination of digital systems and capitalist incentives.”