How disturbing YouTube Videos may affect children in the future.
With the advent of the internet, YouTube ™, and other social media sites, the amount of media content available to the public has skyrocketed. However, most of this content is unfiltered and sometimes even actively malicious. One large issue lately is disturbing videos that attempt to appeal to children appearing on YouTube’s front page and even kids app. These videos rely on both the YouTube ™ algorithm and manipulating children through bright colors and well-known characters to push their content to the front page and into recommended videos. My question is how these videos may affect children.
YouTube’s algorithm is a code used by the site to determine what both you and the general public are most likely to want to watch. It’s based both in types of videos clicked on, and amount of time spent watching that video. However, as the code is unable to understand the content of a video it relies on “tags” to figure out what people may want to watch. These are simply keywords placed in the description of a video by content creators that are meant to represent the content of the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPxnIix5ExI. Malicious content makers are able to get their videos seen by manipulating this algorithm through placing tags that relate to popular children’s media.
These videos often feature both violent and sexual content. They show disturbing images of well-known children’s characters in inappropriate situations, oftentimes with innocuous titles to convince both parents and their children to click. According to parents such as Stacie Burns with the New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-kids-paw-patrol.html these videos have been known to both disturb and frighten young children. While how the videos may affect kids in the long term has yet to be studied, we can examine past tests such as the Bobo Doll Experiment to determine what may happen in the future.
The videos offer a unique and somewhat disturbing opportunity as they give media researchers a chance to examine how the effect of violence and sex may affect children when tied to characters they already recognize. We’ve seen in the past that children who are exposed to violent media (such as Albert Bandura’s experiments) https://www.simplypsychology.org/bobo-doll.html are more likely to engage in violent behaviors. However, Albert Banduras was limited to having children watch violence created by people they didn’t recognize nor had any emotional attachment to.
Because these videos feature popular characters children already have an emotional reaction and even sense of companionship with them. Media and TV have primed children to see certain characters as being morally upstanding and good, children have become used to copying these characters and studies have shown that how successful a character is oftentimes effects how likely people are to want to copy them. Children especially can be affected by this, as they lack real world experience and may rely on media to tell them right from wrong.
The videos may create a problem because they create a situation where characters act inappropriately and in a disturbing fashion without being punished in an appropriate way. This may risk having children view those actions are socially and morally appropriate if they are too young to understand otherwise and have parents who either lack the time or the inclination to tell them otherwise. To conclude, while the surface level of how these videos affect children has been studied and examined by media theorists and journalists alike, how they are likely to affect children in both the near and far future may be more important and perhaps a bigger issue.
