By Judi McLeod ——Bio and Archives--November 11, 2017
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“This scene from a video on YouTube Kids shows Mickey Mouse in a pool of blood while Minnie Mouse watches, aghast. “Malik Ducard, YouTube’s global head of family and learning content, said that the inappropriate videos were “the extreme needle in the haystack,” but that “making the app family friendly is of the utmost importance to us.” “While the offending videos are a tiny fraction of YouTube Kids’ universe, they are another example of the potential for abuse on digital media platforms that rely on computer algorithms, rather than humans, to police the content that appears in front of people — in this case, very young people"“Google said in a written statement Monday that it works to make the app's videos "as family-friendly as possible" and takes feedback very seriously, removing inappropriate videos flagged by users.” (Mercury News, May 18, 2015)
“In an interview shortly after introducing YouTube Kids, its product manager, Shimrit Ben-Yair, told the San Jose Mercury News that the mobile app uses a "two-step process" to select kid-friendly content from the 300 hours of video uploaded to YouTube each minute. (Mercury News) “The first step is to "algorithmically narrow it down to family-friendly content," she said. “The second involves Google employees doing a "manual sampling for quality control, to see if it's family-friendly.” “But that filter is not working, according to advocates and some parents who wrote reviews on the Google Play and iTunes stores documenting how their children discovered violent, sexually explicit or other jaw-dropping content. “The complaint being filed with the FTC is just the latest headache for Google's attempted leap into the toddler tech market. “(Dale) Kunkel was part of a coalition of prominent child advocacy and consumer groups that filed an April complaint with the FTC accusing YouTube Kids of being overly commercialized, inundating young children with ads and promotional content that would not be allowed on broadcast television. “The FTC said at the time it would look into the complaint.That videos that are disturbing children who slip past google’s filters—“either by mistake or because bad actors have found ways to fool the YouTube Kids algorithms” should be of little consequence. Parents who care about how their children are being traumatized by YouTube videos should go after Google with this message: Take.The.App.Down. Generations Y, Z, protect your children from sexually explicit and shocking videos because if you don’t, no one else will.
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