All right this one's definitely a little strange so buckle up we're going to talk
about weird kids videos and gaming the algorithm.
if you don't have kids you quite understandably probably don't watch many YouTube videos intended for
kids and when I say kids really I mean babies. We're going to be talking about
the YouTube equivalent of Teletubbies and Blue's Clues, videos aimed at a
preschool audience. I bring that up first because as we go through all of this
it's helpful to keep in mind that the target audience isn't really making
coherent viewing decisions. Preschool audiences are largely passive viewers,
watching whatever is put in front of them, rather than seeking media out.
there's a lot of content on YouTube for preschoolers that is more or less what
you would expect. pretty much any popular television show like Sesame Street and
Peppa Pig also has a substantial presence on YouTube. In fact a compelling
argument could be made that Peppa Pig is more popular online than through
broadcast television. But as with any popular YouTube genre
there is an attendant flood of low-quality imitators and bootleggers.
Much of it is exactly what you would expect: people uploading stuff they
couldn't find online or just re uploading stuff to skim ad revenue. Then
there's the YouTube-specific genres, such as surprise egg videos toy unboxings and
Nursery Rhymes; things that are more or less what you'd expect from the phrase
YouTube but for kids. You know, YouTube without all the cussing.
but there's also a lot that's decidedly off
just something about it
yeah. So you may already be familiar with this particular sub-genre of children's
media. If you delve into it now in 2017 what you'll find is a hallucinatory mix
of popular characters being run through a gristle mill of family finger songs,
wheels on the bus, monkeys on the bed, wrong heads, Johnny Johnny yes papa,
color and shape matching, and skits revolving around pregnancy, poop, and
adults randomly kicking the crap out of kids. A popular recent article by James
Bridle titled "something is wrong on the Internet" takes a fairly broad dive into
this subject, focusing on the generally unsettling nature of many of the videos.
youtuber h3h3 has done a popular video on people intentionally hijacking the
genre with adult content. Fredrik Knudesen of Down the Rabbit Hole
has done a video on the history of the family finger song in specific, and let's
play channel Retsupuray has done a number of commentaries for animated
videos with titles like "Mickey and Minnie Mouse Baby Missing Abducted
Lethal Injection Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Cartoons Full." The moral of the story
don't murder children I guess? I mean that's alright. Now the actual origins
here are muddled, starting in India in the late 90s with low-grade animated
rhyming video sold on cheap video CDs. The jump to YouTube starts around 2010
with the animation companies basically just uploading their existing catalogue,
but it doesn't really break into the attention of the Anglosphere until 2013
2014 with the proliferation of family finger song videos, and channels
dedicated to posting minute variants of a basic template. With each year as new
styles of children's videos gain popularity their format is simply folded
into the mix. The wordless superhero skits genre in particular is a fairly
new addition, exploding almost out of nowhere in mid-2016 with adults dressed
in popular character costumes (almost universally including spider-man and
Elsa) acting out low-quality absurdist skits. The rapid proliferation is largely
comprehensible: the material barriers to entry are low requiring only a handful
of Halloween costumes some friends and a
lack of dignity; and the standards for quality among four-year-olds are even
lower than average for YouTube. As with the family finger song and a dozen other
subgenres this too has metastasized rapidly into a procedurally generated
animation hellscape. A lot of the disturbing elements can be attributed to
this culturally disconnected history. These are for the most part being
cranked out by South Asian animation companies that, for any of a variety of
reasons, don't share the American ideoform of what acceptable children's
entertainment looks like, or maybe they simply don't care. There's an odd
interplay of memetics, here where someone will make something with the express
purpose of trolling people; intentionally disturbing children's
animation for example; that will gain popularity and subsequently be absorbed
into the meme-body of these channels churning out content programmatically.
Bridal's article in particular spends a good deal of time highlighting the
algorithmic structure of these videos: hundreds of channels uploading hundreds
of videos all operating off the same recombinantory logic of AI procedural
generation, Bridal making a direct comparison to automated on-demand Amazon
stores that place stock images on a variety of products from coffee mugs to
cell phone covers. These children's videos form a sort of inverse Turing
test as whether they are made by individuals who just don't care beyond
min-maxing their search engine optimization, or are made by programs
smashing elements together from a word cloud, it is almost impossible to tell
the difference. Even if made by humans they function as
though they were assembled by machines.
For example this video titled superheroes pregnant soccer balls fidget
spinner Spider Man Joker Hulk cartoon funny kids video pranks is a series
of semi-coherent, however surreal, segments including one where joker sells
Hulk and spider-man magical fidget spinners; pregnant Elsa and spider-man at
the supermarket; and a bunch of superheroes pouring M&Ms into a blender?
Now that last one is actually repeated twice in the same video, and the other
two segments can also be found in other videos. Joker's magic fidget spinners can
also be found in this video titled spider-man Hulk pregnant frozen Elsa
colors gummy fidget spinner Joker prank venom fun superheroes, and pregnant Elsa
and spider-man at the supermarket is the lead segment in the video frozen elsa
pregnant colors superhero spider-man Hulk vs venom Joker fidget spinners
colors for kids. The point is that the videos themselves are procedurally
generated from a library of component videos which are themselves generated
from stock assets, motion capture libraries, and the handful of subjects
that four-year-olds find fascinating. The end result is as Mike Rugnetta put it
metadata slurry. The animated videos are hallucinatory recreations of the already
surreal originals down to unsettling levels of specificity. Buried alive
outdoor playground finger family song nursery rhymes animation education
learning video is clearly a Markov derivative of the popular video buried
alive spider-man vs. frozen elsa baby pink spidergirl joker family fun
superhero movie. One of our previous examples spider-man and pregnant Elsa
the supermarket is an eerily specific recreation of pregnant frozen elsa
giving birth and joker attack spider-man Hulk superheroes movie compilation.
And yeah it's wild that the stuff made by humans is still just word salad but
you need to keep in mind that the target audience can't read so the title is
irrelevant beyond its function as search engine optimization. Now there's already
something troublesome about the fundamental structure of YouTube Kids.
Young children particularly preschoolers are prone to watching the same thing
over and over and over. A kid may watch any given video dozens or even hundreds
of times. As a result many of these videos have absurdly high view counts
with what would in other corners of YouTube be suspiciously low number of
corresponding likes and comments. This, again, makes a bit more sense when you
consider that most four-year-olds can at best only read a few words and can maybe
write their own name. Now that troublesome structure built on a
foundation of chain-viewing four-year-olds gets all the worse when
you consider that it's a perfect environment for mechanized exploitation.
The standards for the content are already so low that it is difficult to
distinguish what is the product of a machine throwing elements together semi
randomly and what is the product of adults who just don't care. The behaviour
patterns of kids chain watching videos while not otherwise engaging is also
easily replicated by bots, and while there's no hard proof of any of these
channels botting, it would be almost effortless to hide if they were.
And here's where it really goes off the rails
Ao as I've already mentioned these procedural animation videos crop up
across multiple channels. The specific pregnant elsa segment we've been using
as an example shows up in videos on channels cartoon animation rhymes, rhymes
lyrics, cartoon rhymes, animals for kids, rhymes for kids, and who knows how many
others. In case you're wondering if this might just be a case of simple theft, all
of these channels belong to the same multi channel network named 3h uox 580
USR n6 h wh o kz jsq. It's case sensitive by the way. I guess i'm saying that the
odds of them all ending up on that same MCN are low, you know? There are 58
channels attached to that MCN, almost all of them posting
nearly identical content based off the same source library. Everything about it
screams minimal human interaction. The strategy here is to cast a very wide net,
with the illusion of diversity. A single channel uploading dozens of videos per
day will quickly trip YouTube spam alarms, but a network of dozens of
channels uploading one video each per day won't. YouTube's search algorithms
and recommended videos try to give you content that's just like whatever you
just watched, but they're also designed to force a bit of variety to prevent a
single channel from totally dominating a given genre. The distributed spam
technique works around this, meaning the algorithm can deliver "diverse" results
from many different channels while actually delivering results that all
point back to the same core entity. But that's not actually even the end of the
story. You might notice that I've stripped the audio entirely from all the
examples that I've used here and there's a good reason for that. So here's an
interesting experiment that I've already done for you. Re-upload a bunch of these
videos and watch the copyright claims come rolling in. I uploaded five videos
to a burner channel and within half an hour had 32 copyright claims, all of
which had the attached policy of a global block. One video in particular got
hit with 13 separate claims. That video was actually one that you might be
familiar with if you read James Bridal's article, as he included it as an example,
and that's buried alive outdoor playground finger family song nursery
rhymes animation education learning video. Now here's the breadcrumb trail:
that video is taken from the channel animals for kids, one of the channels
that's part of the multi channel network 3 Huo X 580 us RN 6 HW h o kz jsq, but
all of the copyright claims point to the multi-channel networks mango Kids,
wacked-out affiliate, and Mobiwalkers-2, with the mango kids being the
overwhelming source of copyright claims. The important implication here is the
disconnect. All of these videos contain content that is rapidly claimed by three
separate networks, each with a standard worldwide block policy.
But the content is demonstrably available on channels under other
networks than the claiming network, meaning that the automated Content ID
claims are either being released or modified. It's not hard proof but it is
compelling and I feel it's fair to say there is a good possibility that these
networks are in fact all the same root entity. mango Kids, Mobiwalkers,
wacked-out, and three Huo X are all the same people,
meaning that whichever one is in fact the originating organization is
operating at least 400 separate YouTube channels proliferating a spam of
children's content, programmatically dominating search results and
recommended videos. Now if you think that YouTube is unaware of this I would point
out that the process of getting a multi-channel network with content
management privileges through YouTube is not an automated process. There is no
application form, they are all handled one at a time by YouTube's content
management teams. These networks are comprised entirely of channels that
exist purely to manipulate YouTube's algorithms. So why doesn't YouTube care?
Well because as long as advertisers are unaware of how many of their impressions
are coming from four-year-olds sitting with an iPad on autoplay then the trade
value of advertising on YouTube will remain higher than the actual value and
YouTube will continue making money. The big reason why YouTube takes measures to
crack down on egregious examples of bots watching videos is because advertisers
don't like the fact that they're paying for ads shown to no one. Now that said, if
we're honest and if we use the 1980s as an indicator there's an awful lot of
advertisers who are ultimately ok with their ads being bombarded on to toddlers
and plenty of creators willing to churn out low effort content to facilitate that.
Man, that's a downer ending.