James Bridle, a writer and artist, examines technology and culture, including the strange, algorithm-driven content aimed at children on YouTube.
HN commenters link his essay on disturbing children's videos while discussing YouTube recommendations, auto-generated content, and what platforms push toward.
What does "checked the wikipedia page" mean? Reading the linked footnotes? And what about "sexual situations, fetishes, drugs" says "Tom & Jerry" to you? Not that the overview on that WP page does it justice, at all. At one point it even said Elsagate "was" a colloquialism, heh.
It's hardly a full list of the themes that are repeated over and over and over again. It involves rape, pregnant infants, (there was one live action thing with Spiderman drugging and raping Elsa and her little child (played by an actual child, though with Elsagate you will also find plenty of adults in diapers or with pacifiers, or otherwise playing a child) as they are unconscious, then delivering both their babies in the form of plastic dolls, and Elsa and her child and Spiderman all being super happy and clapping in delight at the end), a LOT of kidnapping and bondage, children left behind, parents being evil for denying them sweets or staying up late or other things, parents getting hurt by their children or even murdered so children can get something they want, people generally murdering each other out of anger, including with automatic weapons, hands coming out of mirrors or mobile devices, children crying at a graveyard, hands coming out of graves, getting injections to get "made better" regardless of how silly that is (like eating a toy truck and getting an injection because of that), generally eating things and that having some kind of effect, a lot of binge eating, objects or people being…
ElsaGate, enabled by Google and Disney (which owns at least network which owns at least one involved channel) and consisting faked videos for toddlers for strategic destruction and some sort of weird grooming. needles? taping people up? humiliating parents? kids driving cars? adults drugging people and getting them pregnant including minors? eating loads of feces? brand products left, right and center? verified accounts? monetized videos? people begging for removal since last year? but oh yeah look what China is doing.
anyone feel like data crunching? crunch this.
https://gitlab.com/elsagate/blacklist/raw/master/blacklist.txt
and while the data is downloading -- because it's not possible that a community of hackers would look the other way when blatant child abuse (that's defined by what happens to the child, not what the perpetrator gets out of it) is going down directly under their nose or even hands, right? right? it's brain hacking, it's technology, it's mystery, it's capitalism, it's SV, what more do you want? nevermind the material responsibility, the real harm done to, the needless additional pain in the lifes of kids who 'just' get left to autoplay on youtube for long enough -- read this maybe:
https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2
edit: whoever downvoted this without argument, you'll think back to this and feel bad, if you're lucky and both informed and human enough. no more needs to be said. the info is there, CRUNCH…
> Quite frankly it's ridiculous - imagine needing to pay a "fee" to CNN/Fox News/NYTimes/Yahoo just because you have a internet connection and web browser.
This comparison is ridiculous. The license fee is a little outdated in certain aspects but it covers more than just broadcast news as the orgs you mentioned do.
The BBC has a broad remit to inform, educate, and entertain. Not in itself radically different to a lot of other broadcasters, and typical for a public service broadcaster, but the universal license fee is a key differentiator.
In requiring everyone with a television to contribute, the BBC has a duty to serve the entire population of a country, regardless of their income or demographic. This enables the BBC to produce content that may not be commercially viable for privately funded broadcasters that in term can serve communities that would otherwise be overlooked. BBC's Three and Four channels tend to best exemplify this aspect with content that can often be slightly niche and, in the case of Three, regularly have casts and production crews that are far more diverse than the industry averages.
The license fee is also independent of the state budget. The Government does have the power and oversight to adjust funding every 5-11 years, but the royal charter ensures that funding is separate from typical taxation and avoids the Treasury. This also ensures (in theory) that there is more autonomy for accurate, fair, and unbiased news reporting.
The BBC has also for…
This presentation briefly mentions but then seems to mostly forget about "Elsagate" which they call the "Peppa Pig scandal".
James Bridle argues convincingly that the genre of bizarre YouTube videos which appeals to the toddler reptilian brain ( https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2 ) is not created by hostile or evil actors but instead has evolved orgnically based on what stuff toddlers want to click on. Kids' click patterns reward more video themes like "Elsa tied up on train tracks kissing Spiderman", so the content industry crams more of that stuff into its new content.
The result, after a few iterations, would not have passed editorial controls at 1990s Nickelodeon (!), which would normally have halted the feedback loop, but with no one at the helm -- to "censor" or otherwise exert editorial control -- YouTube's kid-targeted videos are just a whole forest of weird.
Does YouTube want to allow their platform to become a laboratory for rapidly discovering local maxima in very young children's fantasy worlds? Do they have any choice? Should they step in and publish rules for what children's content is allowed? Should they hire some kind of human curator or editor to enforce those rules for child-focused videos? Should Web platforms act in loco parentis?
In this cases, in "the Peppa Pig scandal" style situation, the producers are machine-generating content that gets clicks and the consumers are children.
When the issue is the…
While it wouldn't solve the problem in and of itself, I think one mechanism that could help mitigate this phenomenon would be to compel companies like YouTube and Facebook to (somehow) disclose what their algorithms select for promotion (that is, for suggestion or automatic presentation).
When the citizens don't and can't know what YouTube is playing for people, they can't really object.
On the other hand, if the data was there and enough citizens were interested for somebody to analyze the data, then we could know: Oh, during the 6 weeks leading up to the Brexit vote, among the top 1000 videos X% strongly advocated for, Y% strongly advocated against, Z% didn't fit into strong advocacy. Oh, and, this false disproven pro-Brexit piece from Boris Johnson was played 18,960,000 times to an estimated 14,000,000 unique viewers.
That would provide another vector of incentive/consequence that content promoters — algorithmic or otherwise — would have to factor into their decisions.
I think this would also help with the other, extremely related problem of "algorithmic child abuse" described by the viral article "Something is wrong on the internet" from last year[1].
As we shift from a mass broadcast media landscape (TV, radio, print), increasing algorithmic content selection has huge implications, for society, democracy, children, etc.
Because each person (or child) potentially receives their own custom-tailored feed of content (articles, videos) and ads, it is extremely…
The author seems to be suprised by this, not just founding it on Spotify, but the whole process. E.g.:
"I love it, because it’s so strange, so dizzying, and — credit where due–because our mystery producer is truly going with the grain of the medium, in a way that no one merely “making albums” does, at all. What could be more 21st century, more “liquid modernity”, than releasing your music as a haze of variations into the swirling currents of the algorithm?"
But tons of artists have done the same in the past, whether in streaming platforms or in the vinyl and CD era. The most famous is probably Brian Eno who has made several albums using algorithmic generation.
In general, algorithmic composition is a sizable niche, both in academy (tons of music PhDs on that), live performance, and recording settings. And yes, people release those things too.
Even "generated content" to make bucks is a well known thing, both in music platforms like Spotify, in Amazon (tons of auto-generated Kindle books), and in YouTube (https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2).
The strange thing is, the author should already have known all this, as his previous post goes:
"My band The Cotton Modules, formed with the composer Jesse Solomon Clark, also goes with the grain of the 21st century: our process combines AI tools with human skill and imagination, metabolizing a huge archive of recorded music into something genuinely new and exciting."