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YouTube Kids is meant to be the safer, more family-friendly version of the video-sharing platform.

It is aimed at children under the age of 13, after all.

While the company assures parents that the Kids version is carefully curated to bring “a mix of automated filters built by our engineering teams, human review and feedback from parents to protect our youngest users online”, inappropriate videos still end up slipping through the cracks.

Like the cute sounding kids’ character, Huggy Wuggy, that scared unassuming children and deeply alarmed parents.

Yeah, “no system is perfect” and all that, but finding videos promoting skin-bleaching, weight loss, drug culture, and firearms to children as young as two in the mix is perhaps a little too much.

The Tech Transparency Project (TTP), a US-based non-profit, headed up an investigation and found a substantial amount of videos that should not have made it past the set-up filters.

The Guardian has more on what was found:

A Breaking Bad-themed cooking show, for instance, in which the hosts dress up in respirators and make jokes about the risk of inhaling the fumes, might be light-hearted viewing for adults or teens, but has been categorised by YouTube as being appropriate for “younger children” – as has a Minecraft project to recreate the RV, “where the crystal meth is cooked”, from the hit show.

Songs sometimes slip mature themes into the children’s app, too. Eric Clapton’s Cocaine – sample lyric “When your feeling is gone, and you wanna ride on, cocaine” – is available to children as young as five as part of a guitar tuition series.

There was also some gun-related content, including a step-by-step instructional video about how to build a shelf that has a compartment to hide a pistol.

And then there was all the stuff normalising harmful body image issues, like how to apply skin-bleaching products and how to “wiggle your jiggle” and burn calories.

Katie Paul, TTP’s director, said that they didn’t expect to find such a variety of inappropriate content in the investigation, adding that she was most shocked by the drug-related stuff:

“Of course, these aren’t pushing drugs – but a show like Breaking Bad, which is definitely meant for adults, is being mimicked to push rock candy as though it’s ‘baked meth’ using a lot of drug phrases.”

A YouTube spokesperson confirmed that the company had “removed or age-gated a number of the flagged videos from the Kids app” after the review.

It might be wise to keep an eye on the things your kids are watching anyway.

[source:guardian]