Tuesday, July 28, 2020
YouTube's Dark and Dangerous Rabbit Hole
Smartphones are everywhere, at the touch of our fingertips they become rabbit hole in which we can lose ourselves in. Today it's become an essential part of the modern youth's childhood, parents nowadays are more lenient to allow their children to earn their first smartphone at a young age. Its convenience grants applications like YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, etc. But is this convenience a blessing or a curse? I want to primarily focus YouTube, currently its the #1 babysitter recommended by parents to easily keep their children at bay. In other words, it's a digital binkie. But YouTube has been under fire for its incompetency in how they filter NSFW content for the safety of children. If you dig deeper into the depths of YouTube, children are easily expose to predators, there was once a trend of videos in which the comment section was filled with suspicion transfer of phone numbers and sexually explicit comments under videos of young children. A once deleted YouTube channel that masquerades itself as Disney's Elsa possessed videos of dark, satanic imagery with implications of "sacrificing children" and more content I do not want to address. Not to mention that there are many of these channels that easily fool parents into believing their children are watching educational cartoons with their favorite Disney characters, when in fact that is not the case. These too depict mature imagery (without the gory details) but implies, for example "Elsa getting drugged or pregnant." Who is at fault here? Do you think YouTube is the blame for this content to be available or should the parents monitor their child's activity on the internet? How can YouTube make the platform safe for young ages?
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A lot of what was mentioned here has been dealt with by YouTube to a certain extent. They took down the weird mature children's videos, kicked predators off the site (YouTube constantly monitors comment sections for predators but even so they may not be able to keep up with how many of them there are), they have even created a separate application for kids to watch YouTube on entirely. Sure the company definitely has not done this perfectly, but I thought this would be important to mention before I go on. I think that YouTube should definitely take more precautionary measures to keep kids from watching NSFW content and to keep preadators away from kids. To be honest YouTube actually does this the best out of any social networking app out there because they do allow for comment sections, but not private direct messages like other apps. This makes it so when there is a predator it is obvious for them and others to target and eliminate the predator from the site. On sites like Instagram and Snapchat it is harder for the public to protect kids because a lot of the predatory acts that harm kids happen in private between the adult's and child's direct messages. I think the real issue is that many parents use the site as a babysitter to care for their kids even though that is not when it is meant to do. Then once the users of YouTube, not YouTube itself, harms their child the parents take it out on YouTube even though the parents should have been keeping an eye on their child. In conclusion I do not think YouTube or other sites are at fault for exposing children to such things - they should definitely take more measures to prevent that but it still isn't their fault for the parents' incompetence and unwillingness to properly care for their child.
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