As I said at the beginning of this essay: this is being done by people and by things and by a combination of things and people. This is a deeply dark time, in which the structures we have built to sustain ourselves are being used against us — all of us — in systematic and automated ways. It uses existing and easily available content (such as character models and motion-capture libraries) and it can be repeated and revised endlessly and mostly meaninglessly because the algorithms don’t discriminate — and neither do the kids. Bypass Filters. I don’t believe in traumatising other people, but it’s necessary to keep stressing it, and not dismiss the psychological effect on children of things which aren’t overtly disturbing to adults, just incredibly dark and weird. The video used animations from the Grand Theft Auto game series overlaid with cartoon characters assaulting, killing, and burying one another.]. These videos, wherever they are made, however they come to be made, and whatever their conscious intention (i.e. Obviously too this raises questions of fair use, appropriation, free speech and so on. I suppose it’s naive not to see the deliberate versions of this coming, but many are so close to the original, and so unsignposted — like the dentist example — that many, many kids are watching them. The second is the levels of exploitation, not of children because they are children but of children because they are powerless. A friend who works in digital video described to me what it would take to make something like this: a small studio of people (half a dozen, maybe more) making high volumes of low quality content to reap ad revenue by tripping certain requirements of the system (length in particular seems to be a factor). Superhero Finger Family Collection”, “Batman Finger Family Song — Superheroes and Villains! I get the game, but the constant overlaying and intermixing of different tropes starts to get inside you. Little Baby Bum, which made the above video, is the 7th most popular channel on YouTube. What I will argue, on the basis of these cases and of those I’m going to describe further, is that the scale and logic of the system is complicit in these outputs, and requires us to think through their implications. Wild Animals for kids”, “Superheroes Finger Family and more Finger Family Songs! A second way of increasing hits on videos is through keyword/hashtag association, which is a whole dark art unto itself. Those are important debates, but they’re not what is being discussed here. Some of the times it’s troll-y gross-out stuff; most of the time it seems deeper, and more unconscious than that. This video, BURIED ALIVE Outdoor Playground Finger Family Song Nursery Rhymes Animation Education Learning Video, contains all of the elements we’ve covered above, and takes them to another level. We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. Numbers in the long tail aren’t significant in the abstract, but in their accumulation. They’re at play here, but they’re not the whole story. Here’s what is basically a version of Toy Freaks produced in Asia (screenshot above). Toy Freaks is a YouTube verified channel, whatever that means. And yet, there is something weird about a group of people endlessly acting out the implications of a combination of algorithmically generated keywords: “Halloween Finger Family & more Halloween Songs for Children | Kids Halloween Songs Collection”, “Australian Animals Finger Family Song | Finger Family Nursery Rhymes”, “Farm Animals Finger Family and more Animals Songs | Finger Family Collection - Learn Animals Sounds”, “Safari Animals Finger Family Song | Elephant, Lion, Giraffe, Zebra & Hippo! My IP Hide has 95 servers (IP addresses) in 33 countries. Nobody set out to create these shirts: they just paired an unchecked list of verbs and pronouns with an online image generator. YouTube isn’t able to mediate rights ownership disputes. The above video is entitled Wrong Heads Disney Wrong Ears Wrong Legs Kids Learn Colors Finger Family 2017 Nursery Rhymes. I had a computer with internet access in my bedroom from the age of 13. Here are a few things which are disturbing me: The first is the level of horror and violence on display. And right now, right here, YouTube and Google are complicit in that system. In the official Peppa Pig videos, Peppa does indeed go to the dentist, and the episode in which she does so seems to be popular — although, confusingly, what appears to be the real episode is only available on an unofficial channel. I have no idea where they came from or the origin of the children’s rhyme at the core of the trope, but there are at least 17 million versions of this currently on YouTube, and again they cover every possible genre, with billions and billions of aggregated views. That is a whole strange world in and of itself. Once again, the view numbers of these videos must be taken under serious advisement. See what data you have in your Google Account, including the things you do, like searches, and the things you create, like email. Its dimensionality makes it difficult to grasp, or even to really think about. The video titles are a continuous pattern of obscure branded lines and tie-ins: “Surprise Play Doh Eggs Peppa Pig Stamper Cars Pocoyo Minecraft Smurfs Kinder Play Doh Sparkle Brilho,” “Cars Screamin’ Banshee Eats Lightning McQueen Disney Pixar,” “Disney Baby Pop Up Pals Easter Eggs SURPRISE.”, As I write this he has done a total of 4,426 videos and counting. Here’s one from Russia. Surprise Eggs videos depict, often at excruciating length, the process of unwrapping Kinder and other egg toys. The video’s creator, BABYFUN TV (screenshot above), has produced many similar videos. The title alone confirms its automated provenance. Agnes is the arbiter of the scene: when the heads don’t match up, she cries, when they do, she cheers. The culture, politics, and interpersonal relationships which I consider to be central to my identity were shaped by the internet, in ways that I have always considered to be beneficial to me personally. Unlock the power of video and join over 200M professionals, teams, and organizations who use Vimeo to create, collaborate and communicate. You can read an extract from the book, and find out more, here. Maybe it’s just trolls. Please be advised: this essay describes disturbing things and links to disturbing graphic and video content. Access them from any PC, Mac or phone. I don’t really want to use the term “human-led” any more about these videos, although they contain all the same tropes and actual people acting them out. The character Hope from Inside Out weeps through a Smurfs and Trolls head swap. As many of the Wrong Heads videos as I could bear to watch all work in exactly the same way. mine: boolean One of the thus-far hypothetical questions I ask myself frequently is how I would feel about my own children having the same kind of access to the internet today. It goes on and on. But I don’t even have kids and right now I just want to burn the whole thing down. There is a lot of effort going into making these. Numbers in the long tail aren’t significant in the abstract, but in their accumulation. But reports which simply understand the problem through this lens fail to fully grasp the mechanisms being deployed, and thus are incapable of thinking its implications in totality, and responding accordingly. As with Bounce Patrol Kids, however you feel about the content of these videos, it feels impossible to know where the automation starts and ends, who is coming up with the ideas and who is roleplaying them. In a playlist resource, the id property specifies the playlist's YouTube playlist ID. They have so far showed absolutely no inclination to do this, which is in itself despicable. The id parameter specifies a comma-separated list of the YouTube video ID(s) for the resource(s) that are being retrieved. I understand that this is a natural evolution of attitudes which happens with age, and at some point this question might be a lot less hypothetical. I’m going to stop here, saying only this: What concerns me is not just the violence being done to children here, although that concerns me deeply. What is occurring here is clearly automated. The question becomes: how did this come to be? In a video resource, the id property specifies the video's ID. I’ve seen family members and friend’s children plugged into Peppa Pig and nursery rhyme videos, and it makes them happy and gives everyone a break, so OK. While I find it disturbing, I can understand how it might provide some of the rhythm or cadence or relation to their own experience that actual babies are attracted to in this content, although it has been warped and stretched through algorithmic repetition and recombination in ways that I don’t think anyone actually wants to happen. Here is a relatively mild, but still upsetting example: A step beyond the simply pirated Peppa Pig videos mentioned previously are the knock-offs. The video consists of a regular version of the Finger Family song played over an animation of character heads and bodies from Disney’s Aladdin swapping and intersecting. Other channels do away with the human actors to create infinite reconfigurable versions of the same videos over and over again. Obviously this content is inappropriate, obviously there are bad actors out there, obviously some of these videos should be removed. id: string The id parameter specifies a comma-separated list of the YouTube subscription ID(s) for the resource(s) that are being retrieved. I believe they have an absolute responsibility to deal with this, just as they have a responsibility to deal with the radicalisation of (mostly) young (mostly) men via extremist videos — of any political persuasion. to accumulate ad revenue) are feeding upon a system which was consciously intended to show videos to children for profit. Feel Free to Call Cardi B a 'Female Rapper': 'I Just Feel So Powerful Being a Girl' I don’t know what to think any more. Who’s writing these scripts, editing these videos? Exploitation is encoded into the systems we are building, making it harder to see, harder to think and explain, harder to counter and defend against. Input the site link or use the quick button to access it. It's all here. As someone who grew up on the internet, I credit it as one of the most important influences on who I am today. Channel after channel after channel of similar content, churned out at the rate of hundreds of new videos every week. The length of many of these videos — one common video tactic is to assemble many nursery rhyme or cartoon episodes into hour+ compilations —and the way that length is marketed as part of the video’s appeal, points to the amount of time some kids are spending with them. I state this at the outset because thinking through the implications of the problem I am going to describe troubles my own assumptions and prejudices in significant ways. I describe it below if you don’t want to watch it and head down that road. We also have fresh proxy lists and proxy software. It’s not about trolls, but about a kind of violence inherent in the combination of digital systems and capitalist incentives. Maybe after everything I’ve said you won’t think it’s so bad. Writer and Artist. With ProxySite.com you can relax and watch the latest videos in high definition quality. The API will only return that channel's subscriptions. The maker of my particular favorite videos is “Blu Toys Surprise Brinquedos & Juegos,” and since 2010 he seems to have accrued 3.7 million subscribers and just under 6 billion views for a kid-friendly channel entirely devoted to opening surprise eggs and unboxing toys. Unblock websites and hide your real IP address, still, enjoy the fast web. Hide IP address and unblock websites with lightning fast, stable, and encrypted proxies. myRating: string This parameter can only be used in a properly authorized request. This is not what many of us want. Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube. I spend a lot of time arguing for this tendency, with regards to human sexual freedom, individual identity, and other issues. (“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”). The first of these tactics is simply to copy and pirate other content. There are humans in the loop here, even if only on the production side, and I’m pretty worried about them too. One account for multiple devices (Windows, Mac, Android, and Linux). According to my friend, online kids’ content is one of the few alternative ways of making money from 3D animation because the aesthetic standards are lower and independent production can profit through scale. (Yes, this is the exact same process as the delamination of trusted news media on Facebook feeds and in Google results that is currently wreaking such havoc on our cognitive and political systems and I am not going to explicitly explore that relationship further here, but it is obviously deeply significant.). We accept paypal, credit card, bitcoin, webmoney, and many other payment methods. While it is tempting to dismiss the wilder examples as trolling, of which a significant number certainly are, that fails to account for the sheer volume of content weighted in a particularly grotesque direction. In the version above, she is basically tortured, before turning into a series of Iron Man robots and performing the Learn Colours dance. I’ve also been aware for some time of the increasingly symbiotic relationship between younger children and YouTube. Let’s look at just one video among the piles of kid videos, and try to parse out where it comes from. And this belief broadens into attitudes about the role of the internet in public life as whole. I would want my kids to have the same opportunities to explore and grow and express themselves as I did. Automated reward systems like YouTube algorithms necessitate exploitation in the same way that capitalism necessitates exploitation, and if you’re someone who bristles at the second half of that equation then maybe this should be what convinces you of its truth. In a subscription resource, the id property specifies the YouTube subscription ID. There’s a second level of what I’m characterising as human-led videos which are much more disturbing than the mostly distasteful activities of Toy Freaks and their kin. In a channel resource, the id property specifies the channel's YouTube channel ID. This, I think, is my point: The system is complicit in the abuse. In turn, the amplification of tropes in popular, human-led channels such as Toy Freaks leads to them being endlessly repeated across the network in increasingly outlandish and distorted recombinations. Facebook, Youtube). The above channel, Videogyan 3D Rhymes — Nursery Rhymes & Baby Songs, posts several videos a week, in increasingly byzantine combinations of keywords. I have no idea where the “Wrong Heads” trope originates, but I can imagine, as with the Finger Family Song, that somewhere there is a totally original and harmless version that made enough kids laugh that it started to climb the algorithmic rankings until it made it onto the word salad lists, combining with Learn Colors, Finger Family, and Nursery Rhymes, and all of these tropes — not merely as words but as images, processes, and actions — to be mixed into what we see here. The internet has a way of amplifying and enabling many of our latent desires; in fact, it’s what it seems to do best. It presents many and complexly entangled dangers, including that, just as with the increasing focus on alleged Russian interference in social media, such events will be used as justification for increased control over the internet, increasing censorship, and so on. But both stories take at face value YouTube’s assertions that these results are incredibly rare and quickly removed: assertions utterly refuted by the proliferation of the stories themselves, and the growing number of social media posts, largely by concerned parents, from which they arise. They literally had no idea what they were doing. Once again though, the people creating this content failed to notice, and neither did the distributor. When you connect to a website through our web proxy, you aren't actually connecting to the website you're viewing. It’s important to stress that I didn’t set out to find this particular video: it appeared organically and highly ranked in a search for ‘finger family’ in an incognito browser window (i.e. My First channel “My list” is suspended. And I find the question increasingly difficult to answer. We have built a world which operates at scale, where human oversight is simply impossible, and no manner of inhuman oversight will counter most of the examples I’ve used in this essay. Google has many special features to help you find exactly what you're looking for. All the 4chan tropes are there, the trolls are out, we know this. In the official timeline, Peppa is appropriately reassured by a kindly dentist. Last year, there were a number of articles posted about the Surprise Egg craze. A new music service with official albums, singles, videos, remixes, live performances and more for Android, iOS and desktop. 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