Watch out for Minecraft videos your kids are watching on YouTube: They’re dirty, filled with gore and violence

A recent investigation has found dozens of child-focused Minecraft videos featuring disturbing thumbnails that YouTube is serving on its platform.

One morning, hundreds of viewers watched an animated video broadcast live on Minecraft featuring a topless woman opening a gift filled with emojis.

It’s just one of a number of disturbing and downright grotesque animated videos, featured Wired found on the topic page about Minecraft of the YouTube platform, a content sorting feature introduced in 2019. Similar thumbnails found there include an image of the game’s avatar with heart eyes and a baby in his hand. bloody knife is smiling looking at a chained bikini woman. Or a pair of parents hitting a crying toddler with a stick. Or a pregnant woman about to sit on top of a man. These live videos are broadcast over and over again for hours on end, some of which have racked up tens of thousands of views. Some of these channels receive tens of thousands of views per day.

In 2017, in an incident known as “Elsagate,” journalists discovered hundreds of YouTube videos featuring sexually explicit or violent imagery but masquerading as “child-friendly” on the YouTube app. Kids, considered by the platform to be age-appropriate for viewers. These videos, depicting child abuse, murder, and other R-rated content, often feature popular children’s TV characters like Peppa Pig or Princess Elsa, or hide under headlines no reward, no punishment. It is this deception that seems to have helped them get out of the control of the YouTube algorithms. And their creators are indie creators or animators. In response, YouTube removed more than 150,000 videos and over 2 million ads.

YouTube’s “Elsagate” purge reveals only the tip of the iceberg, in terms of how unscrupulous content creators target children, one of YouTube’s largest audiences. But since that 2017, YouTube has added a few new discoverability features: Topic pages, #hashtag content pages, and video game directories. And while it’s not easy to find videos like the toxic Peppa Pig or Elsa on YouTube these days, a recent investigation by Wired discovered dozens of content channels that are targeting game fans Minecraft and Among Us.

While the videos mentioned above don’t appear to appear on the YouTube Kids app, more than half of the most viewed videos on YouTube are for kids. Rhymes, educational videos… are what entertain and soothe cranky kids whose parents are in need of a break. And parents often turn them on and off, helping them get millions of views. A lot of these kid-oriented videos are produced by official channels that have the intellectual property rights to celebrities, but others are just low-budget photo series by third parties. three, want to make money from children’s boundless love for online broadcast content.

And if you don’t know yet Minecraft is the most popular game on YouTube, and at any given time, tens of thousands of people – many of them children – are watching content about Minecraft. Click on the keyword Minecraft in YouTube’s game home page will take the user to the Themes page of Minecraft. This page is generated by YouTube based on concurrent viewers by default. On March 29, the thumbnail in the first video depicts a drooling police officer with heart-shaped eyes looking at a large-breasted female character with pink panties placed next to her. beside. Six thousand people watched that video live. And videos Minecraft Others also have thumbnails with shocking content, alluding to violence, sex, and evil elements. And these images only partially reflect the content built into the video.

YouTube divides its Topics page into 5 sections: Live, Recommended, Recent, Popular, and Official. Of course, these include featured videos, or Minecraft tutorials. But scattered among them are videos with thumbnails of inappropriate content, especially if users watch or actively search for them. And the Live section has the highest concentration of these types of content. It can be said that these sensational images have contributed to attracting videos with hundreds to thousands of views from the audience.

In 2020, an investigation by Wired also shows that YouTube Gaming Live content is dominated by scams, which can help creators attract thousands of concurrent viewers. Videos promoting the fraudulent GTA V game will link to sketchy websites, including those that have the potential to take over user logins. And no one can count how many views on Minecraft videos violating this platform pushed to the top of its Topics page.

YouTube’s #hashtag aggregator is a feature introduced by the platform in 2018, which aggregates all videos with a certain tag. And it’s also much better uncensored than the aforementioned Themes feature. For example, in content pages that start with the hashtag #Among Us, videos that rank high on the list include a profile picture of a female character removing her bra, or a scene where a male character tries to peek under a skirt woman actor.

Many of the videos mentioned above have received more than a million views. According to research, these types of content are focusing on emerging games like Minecraft and Among Us, while some other categories of games that are popular with kids don’t seem to have the same problem. And not all videos have bad content inside, much of the disturbing content is limited to shocking thumbnails, presumably to entice people to click.

YouTube has struggled to make its platform kid-friendly since its inception, but as it has grown in itself into something to calm kids down when their parents are busy, The problems only get more complicated. In 2019, multiple reports of mild child pornography videos received millions of views on YouTube. These videos have been enabled for pre-roll monetization from game companies like 4A and Epic Games. YouTube also received a $170 million fine in 2019 for failing to comply with children’s privacy laws, including tracking children on the internet. YouTube later announced it would stop collecting user data on videos popular with children.

And due to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule, YouTube is unable to provide its services to children under the age of 13. But during a recent hearing on online misinformation, lawmakers criticized YouTube’s inability to consistently enforce that rule. In response, Google CEO Sundar Pichai mentioned the YouTube Kids app.

YouTube Kids has multiple levels of supervision. But it’s hard to tell if disturbing content will pass those surveillance filters.

“It seems that what we are now learning is that algorithms are vulnerable to manipulation and the volume of videos that need censorship exceeds the level of human censorship that YouTube is willing or able to manage.” Christine Elgersma, senior editor of social networks and learning resources at Common Sense Media, shared. “Ideally, topics that are popular with children would be more moderated and YouTube would be on the lookout for fake videos like in the past.”

But, a broader problem is that YouTube is distributing content that is not suitable for children through topics that appeal to them, such as games. Minecraft. Wired shared three of the dozens of videos above with YouTube. The platform removed one video with a thumbnail that violated its child safety policy and another for violating its nudity and pornography policy.

“Since Elsagate, we’ve invested heavily in systems and policies that allow for the rapid removal of infringing content,” he said. YouTube spokeswoman Ivy Choi said.

But the related videos mentioned above, attached to the games on YouTube are not a repeat of Elsagate. Also, they’re not on YouTube Kids, where YouTube is trying to appeal to its under-13 audience. With videos of sexual abuse just two clicks away from YouTube’s homepage, it raises the question of whether the platform can do all it can.

By: Wired