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Bizarre Videos Online on YouTube targeting kids

I woke up this morning to this Reddit thread here over bizarre videos being put up on YouTube targeting kids which links to a Verge article here which in turn links to a New York Times article here and a Medium.com blog post here over the matter.

I decided to write 60 Minutes to see if they would do a story on this. Below is what I wrote:

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To 60 Minutes,

I was wondering if you would produce a story on inappropriate videos being targeted toward children on social media sites, specifically on YouTube. There was a recent The Verge article here that gives links to other articles here (Medium.com) and here (New York Times) that give an overview over this phenomenon.

Given this, it stills seems that while YouTube claims that they will be working on improving this problem, it seems that simply just flagging the videos still does no good or re-writing algorithms. There was a recent Reddit thread here that discusses the problem, and a few of the commenters have pointed out that it’s not in YouTube’s interest to take down content for fear of angering advertisers and generating revenue. The problem as described by other comments on the thread explains that kids will search for anything that is slightly deviant, i.e “fart” or “bad” to watch behind their parents back; and because these videos are brought up by the search algorithm, it yields more revenue generated because of all the views; which then just feeds back into the algorithm for more views or highly viewed videos.

As an example of strange videos or videos that have some sort of fetish undertones, see here (strange behavior) and  (NOTE: NOT Really Safe For Work) here.

There’s an entire Reddit dedicated to this here for “Elsa” videos; where popular characters are re-done in videos showing performing bizarre or strange behavior.

While I am personally all for freedom of speech and information online; public entities like YouTube can and should do a better job of flagging and keeping this information away from children. And it should be noted that parents can and always should take an active role in filtering content for their kids. Technology should not be a substitute for good parenting.

Thank you for taking the time to read this email,

[ BLANK] 
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