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Among the millions of algorithmically-generated videos on YouTube attempting to hack keyword searches, autoplay rankings, and human cognition, a very sizeable number are aimed at children, playing on common YouTube tropes such as nursery rhymes, surprise eggs, learning colours and popular songs and characters.

A very significant number of these however are intentionally disturbing, segueing from standard cartoon fare into nightmarish situations of pain, fear, violence and abuse, with a notable propensity for things which particularly trouble children: dentistry, blood, injections, insects, and evil clowns. The knock-off Peppa Pigs above are at the very mildest end of this spectrum.

What is particularly troubling is that while there is a connection here to the kind of algorithmic weirdness that youtube and other similar complex computational systems throw up with increasing regularity (the rape tshirts, the adult diaper phone cases), this is not fully automated, random, or accidental, but a deliberate, intentional attempt to terrorise and traumatise children, performed on a massive scale, using Youtube and its algorithms as its attack vector.

References, in ascending order of disturbingness:

YouTube has a fake Peppa Pig problem - The Outline

Disturbing, fake YouTube shows fool kids for more clicks - Engadget

On YouTube Kids, Startling Videos Slip Past Filters - New York Times

Check out the cover to this mix i made for my friend zach over at 1833.fm :)

the screenshots here are from near the end of the interview, which i think makes it even worse, because the interviewer listened to everything he’d said and still didn’t treat it very seriously. there are other parts where she seems very smart and intuitive, but then other times he’d say something like “i hate myself to death and feel like i’m an empty shell” and she’d just laugh and move on while i’m just like !!!

i was really impressed by how open he is about it though, even the “ugly” symptoms that aren’t really talked about normally — like how he said he used to lock himself in his apartment alone and drink and “bang on the walls” because he didn’t know how else to cope with all the pain he was in, and he even mentions hurting himself and talks about scars and refers to himself as a “masochist” and says a coworker once referred to him as “someone constantly trying to hurt himself.” the fact that he was able to talk about all this so openly, despite the reaction he got, was so impressive and amazing to me

I’M WRITING A BOOK!  - Please help me out!