There's something very strange happening on the YouTube Kids app, and some of it is certainly not appropriate for children. Jonathan Strickland and this is tech stuff daily. YouTube Kids is an app that Google markets directly to parents of young children. In fact, on the landing page for the app, you'll find a description that reads a safer online experience
for kids. Just below that is a caveat, however, and one that seems to be in response to a flurry of news stories about questionable content popping up on the platform. The caveat says YouTube Kids is designed to filter out inappropriate videos for kids, but no system is perfect. If a video that's inappropriate shows up in the app, you have the power to block it, flag it, and bring
it to our attention for fast review. That probably comes as small comfort to parents who have seen their kids react to some truly bizarre and in some cases out right disturbingly violent or provocative content. Media outlets including Medium and The New York Times have reported on the large number of odd and sometimes upsetting videos that come up either through searching specific terms or as suggested videos picked
by various algorithms. So, what the heck is going on there? Are, not surprisingly, several elements to this story, and part of it is just due to the sheer amount of video being uploaded to YouTube. That's about four hundred hours of video joining the platform every minute. In other words, within ten minutes, four thousand hours of video jumps on board. At that scale, it's literally impossible to have human beings combed through the video content and make sure everything is
on the up and up. You either automate or you shut down. If humans were responsible for reviewing all the footage, they'd find themselves falling further behind with every minute of video they reviewed. It would be as if they were in one of those horror movies where a character runs down a hall only to see the door at the end get further away. Another issue is that we've gotten pretty good at automation in general, not great at it,
but good enough for it to be a problem. For example, you might create an algorithm that looks for the most popular search terms used on platform like YouTube kids. You get this list of terms, which likely have little to do with one another, and you use a different algorithm to piece together a nonsensical video that takes those different components and creates a sort of mash up. The resulting video would likely be pretty awful, but still pop up in search or along a list of related videos in
a sidebar. There are also automated programs that drive up video viewing numbers. In other words, some of these videos may have been designed and even assembled by bots and shown to other bots. Based on the quality of some of these videos, I think it's safe to say that robots have exceedingly low standards when it comes to entertainment. If that were all there were to this story, it
would be curious but not terribly important. But those videos are also seen by children, not just brainless algorithms, and some of the videos can be quite upsetting. It's likely that so called bad actors made some of those videos, particularly the more egregiously violent or inappropriate ones, whether they were doing it as an attempt at satire or just to take figures that appeal to kids and put them
in inappropriate situations. The problem is that some of these videos are slipping through the filters on YouTube kids and are being seen by actual children. So why would anyone bother to do this? If we set aside those who just enjoy stirring up trouble and causing distress. It likely comes down to money. Specifically, we're talking ad revenue. If you want to make a lot of money off of YouTube videos, you need to get as many eyeballs on those videos as possible while bringing down the cost of
production as much as you can. That's where all that automation comes in. The videos don't have to have good content, they just have to be good at being discovered. A quick search through the kid videos will uncover plenty of ones that have nonsensical titles consisting solely of popular keywords. If people were involved in any step in that process, it was with a light touch. Children also tend to fixate uncertain characters, songs, nursery rhymes, or other elements that
video producers can exploit. The result is an onslaught of low quality and sometimes wildly inappropriate content. The money side of this issue is a huge problem. The video publishers are making money by serving up ads against these videos. YouTube takes a cut of that money as well, so there's a lot of incentive to make tons of content optimized to get lots of views, and little incentive on
YouTube's part to crack down on it. In addition, short of developing incredibly effective algorithms that can somehow judge quality. There are few logical options open to the company to combat the trend. At the moment, the onus seems to fall on parents. They are meant to report troublesome videos, which can be removed by you Tube, but by then
the damage may be done personally. I do think parents have a responsibility to make certain their children aren't being exposed to inappropriate material, but I also think YouTube should hold itself accountable for marketing and app to kids without being able to make certain the content on that app is actually appropriate. If the company cannot guarantee that, I think it should probably not offer the app, But there's a lot of money to be made, so I suspect
it will stick around. That's all for today. To learn more about streaming media, online communities, and other tricky subjects in the age of the Internet, subscribe to the Tech Stuff podcast we published on Wednesdays and Fridays, and we explore all things tech that includes the good, the bad, and the ugly. I'll see you again, s