Protecting the Future of Tomorrow
TedTalks are influential videos that spread innovative ideas on the internet. However, not all videos that are posted online are good ones. In the TedTalk “The nightmare videos of children’s YouTube — and what’s wrong with the internet today,” James Bridle speaks to the challenges children are facing today. Children nowadays are becoming addicted to smart devices and the internet. The addiction stems from the constant dopamine that is being released when they watch videos online that they enjoy. There is nothing wrong with children watching videos online, except when it spirals out of their control. With easy access to the internet, children are witnessing inappropriate videos due to the rabbit hole on platforms such as YouTube.
Children may click on a video of their favorite television show which could ultimately lead to crude or inappropriate humor. These videos are uploaded by third party accounts whose intentions may not always be pure or intended for a younger audience. However, the algorithm on these platforms does not know that young children are the ones watching the AutoPlay videos. The thought of the lack of control that we as protectors have is a frightening one because we cannot always monitor what kids watch. Bridle speaks to the fact that these inappropriate videos do influence children negatively and in turn traumatize them. That leads me to ask, what can we do to help the children who have already been traumatized overcome this? Would therapy be the solution? What if children’s parents cannot afford to send them to therapy or are against it? So many open-ended questions and not too many solutions to this situation. Another question comes to mind, what can we do to prevent children from getting traumatized?
With the millions of videos online it seems impossible to monitor every single one and report it as inappropriate. Bridle mentions how AI can monitor these types of videos, but that can lead to the issue of censorship. This is a tricky issue because on one hand we do not want free speech to be censored, but on the other we cannot keep letting videos traumatize the future of tomorrow. Another solution could be human monitoring the videos, but that puts them at risk of getting traumatized too. It seems unfair to put that much pressure on a team of people. Additionally, it seems unfair to assign that much work to people because I do not believe it is possible for even a hundred people to go through every video posted to the internet. As the internet keeps evolving, we have to do our best to keep up and adapt because the future depends on it.
