Internet: everything is very bad
Unknown garbage penetrates the brains of hundreds of millions of children and we are all accomplices in this.
I'm James Bridle . I am a writer and artist concerned with technology and culture. I usually write on my own blog, but honestly, I don’t want what I’m saying here is somewhere near my own site. Please note: this essay describes disturbing things and links to disturbing graphic and video content. You do not have to read this, and I recommend caution when studying.
')
As a person who grew up on the Internet, I believe that the network has had one of the most important influences on who I am today. In my room was a computer with Internet access from 13 years old. It gave me access to many things that were completely out of place for a teenager, but everything was in order. Culture, politics and interpersonal relationships, which I consider to be the main ones for my personality, were formed on the Internet in a way that I have always considered useful for myself. I have always been a critical supporter of the Internet and all that he brought, and in general I considered it emancipatory and useful. I declare this from the very beginning, because, reflecting on the consequences of the problem, I will, to a large extent, rely on my own generalizations and prejudices.
One of these hypothetical questions that I often ask myself is what I will feel when my own children have the same access to the Internet today. And I understand that the question is harder to answer. I understand that this is a natural evolution of relationships that occur with age, and at some point this question may be much less hypothetical. I do not want to be a hypocrite in this. I would like my children to have the same opportunities to explore and grow and express themselves the way I do. I wish they had that choice. And this belief broadens the attitude towards the role of the Internet in public life in general.
For a while, I was also aware of the increasingly symbiotic relationship between children and YouTube. I see that children look at the screen with enthusiasm all the time, in wheelchairs and in restaurants, and there is always a little sense of Luddism, but I am not a parent, and I do not accept parental judgments for anyone. I saw how family members and children of a friend connected to watching Peppa Pig and children's rhyme videos, and that made them happy and gave everyone a breather, so everything is fine.
But I don't even have children, and now I just want to destroy it all.
Someone or something, or some kind of amalgamation of people and things, uses YouTube to systematically scare, hurt and abuse children, automatically and on a large scale, and this causes me to question my own beliefs about the Internet at all levels. Much of what I’m going to describe next was covered elsewhere, although none of the popular highlights I saw really understood the consequences of what seems to be happening.
For starters: YouTube Kids is definitely and visibly odd. For a while I knew about this weirdness. Last year, many articles were published on Surprise Eggs. Videos from Surprise Eggs, often long and painful, show the process of unfolding Kinder and other eggs with toys. This is all the content, but the children are fascinated by it. There are hundreds and thousands of these videos and hundreds and thousands, if not millions, of children watching them.
From the article above :
This should give you some insight into how strange the world of children's online video is, and this list of videos hints at the extreme size and complexity of this situation. It looks harmless, but after a couple of minutes you will understand that this is part of some rather strange garbage.
Another huge image, especially for the youngest children, is children's rhymed videos.
Little Baby Bum , which made the above video, is the 7th most popular channel on YouTube. In just 515 videos, they scored 11.5 million subscribers and 13 billion views . Again, there are questions about the accuracy of these numbers, which I will soon receive, but the key point is that it is a huge, huge network and industry.
The video is a lure for parents and for children, and therefore for content creators and advertisers. Small children are hypnotized by these videos, whether they are familiar characters and songs, or just bright colors and soothing sounds. The length of many of these videos is one common goal of a video to collect a variety of poems for children or cartoons in watch collections - and, thus, length positions as part of the appeal of the video, indicating the amount of time some children spend with it.
Thus, the leading channels on YouTube have developed a huge number of tactics to attract the attention of parents and children to their videos, as well as advertising revenues that accompany them. The first of these tactics is simply copying and pirating other content. A simple search for “Peppa Pig” on YouTube in my case gave “about 10,400,000 results”, the first page consists almost entirely of videos from the official channel “Peppa Pig Official Channel”, and one of the videos from the unofficial channel called Play Go Toys, which you really wouldn't notice if you weren't looking for him:
The Play Go Toys channel consists of (I guess?) Pirated content from Peppa Pig and other cartoons, a video with toy boxing (another magnet for children) and, presumably, a video with the channel’s own children. I do not say anything bad about Play Go Toys; I just show how the YouTube structure makes it easier for the content and author bundles, and how it affects our awareness and trust in its source.
As another blogger notes, one of the traditional roles of proprietary content is that he is a trusted source. Whether it is Peppa Pig on the children's channel or Disney movies, whatever their feelings about the industrial model of entertainment, they are carefully thought out and controlled so that the children are essentially safe, looking at them and can be trusted. This no longer works when the brand and content are not connected by the platform, and so well-known and reliable content provides a seamless gateway for untested and potentially harmful content.
(Yes, this is the same process as splitting up reliable media in Facebook feeds and Google results , which are currently causing such damage to our educational and political systems, and I will not explicitly explore these relationships further now, but this is obvious , is of great importance.)
The second way to increase the number of video views is through a keyword / hashtag association, which in itself is a whole dark art. When a trend, such as Surprise Egg videos, reaches a critical mass, content producers lean on it, creating hundreds and thousands of these videos in any possible quantity. This is the source of all the strange names in the list above: corporate content and nursery rhyme names and “surprise egg”, all stuffed into a salad of similar words to capture search results, placement on the side panels and “up” rating for autoplay.
A prime example of strangeness is the Finger Family video (a harmless example inserted above). I have no idea where they came from, and the origin of the nursery rhyme at the base of the images, but YouTube has at least 17 million versions , and they again cover all possible genres: with a total of billions of views.
Again, the number of views on these videos should have been taken under serious control. A huge number of these videos are mainly created by bots and viewed by bots, and even commented on by bots. This is a whole strange world in itself. But we should not hide the fact that there are also many real children immersed in iPhones and tablets, they watch it again and again - partly, given the increased number of views - they are taught to type the main search terms in the browser or simply scroll through the sidebar to enable another video.
What I find somewhat disturbing about the distribution of normal (relatively) normal children's videos is the inability to determine the degree of automation that works here; how to understand the gap between man and machine. The example above, from a channel called Bounce Patrol Kids, with almost two million subscribers, demonstrates this effect in action. They publish professionally created videos with real actors, about one video a week. Once again, I do not say anything bad about Bounce Patrol, which clearly follow in the footsteps of pre-digital children's sensations, like their Australian colleagues The Wiggles .
And yet there is something strange about a group of people who act endlessly regardless of the combination of algorithmically generated keywords: “Halloween Finger Family & more Halloween Songs for Children | Kids Halloween Songs Collection ”,“ Australian Animals Finger Family Song | Finger Family Nursery Rhymes ”,“ Farm Animals Finger Family and more Animals Songs | Finger Family Collection - Learn Animals Sounds ”,“ Safari Animals Finger Family Song | Elephant, Lion, Giraffe, Zebra & Hippo! Wild Animals for kids ”,“ Superheroes Finger Family and more Finger Family Songs! Superhero Finger Family Collection ”,“ Batman Finger Family Song - Superheroes and Villains! Batman, Joker, Riddler, Catwoman ”and on and on. This production of content in the era of algorithmic discovery — even if you are human, you must ultimately personalize the machine.
Other channels abandoned real actors to create endless reconfigurable versions of the same videos over and over. What is happening here is clearly automated. Stock animations, soundtracks, and lists of thousands of keywords create an endless stream of video. The aforementioned channel, Videogyan 3D Rhymes - Nursery Rhymes & Baby Songs , posts several videos a week, using more byzantium in keyword combinations. They have almost five million subscribers — more than double the Bounce Patrol — although I’ll say it again — it’s impossible to know who or what actually does these millions and millions of views.
I try not to turn this essay into an endless list of examples, but it is important to understand how extensive this system is and how uncertain its actions, process and audience are. It also has an international character: there are variations of the Finger Family and Learn Colors for the Tamil epics and Malaysian cartoons that are unlikely to appear in the search results in the English version. This uncertainty and reach are key to its existence and its consequences. Its dimension makes it difficult to understand.
We have come across very clear examples of the alarming results of full automation before that - some of them were fortunately left with dark humor, others - not so much. Much has been done with the help of algorithmic crosses of libraries of stock photos and at the request of production, everything from t-shirts to mugs, from children's overalls to phone cases. The above example, available until recently on Amazon, is one such case, and the story of how this happened is fascinating and strange, but essentially understandable . Nobody was going to create phone covers with drugs and medical equipment on them, it was just a very strange mathematical / probabilistic result. The fact that it took some time to notice may cause some alarm calls.
Similarly, the keep Calm and Rape A Lot t-shirts (along with Keep Calm and Knife Her and Keep Calm and Hit Her) are depressing and sad, but it's pretty clear that no one was going to create these shirts: they just tied an uncontrollable list of verbs and pronouns using an online image generator. It is possible that none of these T-shirts that have ever physically existed have ever been bought or worn, and therefore there was no harm. Again, the people creating this content did not notice, and the distributor did nothing. They literally had no idea what they were doing .
What I’ll be arguing about, based on these cases and those I’ll talk about next, is that the scale and logic of the system are complicit in these results and require us to analyze their consequences.
(Again, I’m not going to delve into the broader social implications of such processes beyond what I’m writing here, but it is clear that a clear line can be drawn from such examples as pressing contemporary issues, such as racial and gender bias in large data systems and machine systems that require urgent attention, but in the same way have nothing like simple or even preferred solutions.)
Let's look at only one video among a pile of video for children and try to figure out where it came from. It is important to emphasize that I was not going to find this video: it turned out to be higher in rating when searching for “finger family” in incognito mode (that is, the previous search should not affect it). This automation leads us to very, very strange places, and at this moment the rabbit hole is so deep that it is impossible to understand how this happened.
Once again, a warning about the content: this video is not entirely inappropriate, but it is clearly disabled and contains elements that may disturb someone. It is very soft on the scale of such things, but. I write this below if you do not want to watch it and go along this road. This warning will be repeated.
The aforementioned video is called Nursery Rhymes . The name confirms its automatic origin. I have no idea where the expression “Wrong Heads” comes from, but I can imagine that, like with the song Finger Family, somewhere there is a completely original and harmless version that the children laughed at after being processed by the algorithm to the list of words that are incoherent with each other, in combination with “Learn Colors”, “Finger Family” and “Nursery Rhymes”, and all these combinations — not just as words, but as images, processes and actions — are mixed with what we see here.
The video consists of the usual version of the song Finger Family, performed on top of the animation of the heads changing and intersecting the heads and bodies of the characters from Disney's Aladin. Again, this is strange, but, frankly, no more than Surprise Egg videos or anything else that children watch. I understand how innocent it is. The discrepancy is accompanied by the appearance of a non-Baldadian character, Agni, a little girl from Despicable Me. Agnes is the arbiter of the scene: when the heads do not coincide, she cries, when they coincide, she rejoices.
The creator of the video, BABYFUN TV (screenshot above), released a lot of similar videos. Like many of the videos with the wrong mix of heads that I could watch, they worked the same way. Cartoon Character Puzzle cries when changing heads of Trolls and Smurfs between themselves. It goes on and on. I see it as a game, but the constant imposition and mixing of different types gradually penetrates into us. BABYFUN TV has only 170 subscribers and a very low number of views, but there are thousands and thousands of such channels. The numbers in this long tail are insignificant in the abstract sense, but their number is significant .
The question arises: how did this happen? The image of “Bad Baby”, also present on the BABYFUN channel, has the same crying. While I find it disturbing, I can understand that this may provide some rhythm or attitude to their own experiences, as real children are involved in the content of the video. Although it was stretched and distorted by algorithmic repetition and recombination in such a way that I do not think that anyone wants this to happen to him.
Toy Freaks is an extremely popular channel ( 68th on the platform ), in which the father and his two daughters act out - or, in some cases, perhaps act like they were in life - like many of the images that we have highlighted before, including “Bad Baby”, above. Like nursery rhymes and flower teaching, Toy Freaks specializes in abusive situations, as well as in other genres, many people watching this channel are on the edge of their outrage, if they don’t go beyond it, seeing videos with how disgusting children behave, Toy Freaks - This is an approved YouTube channel, whatever that means. (I think we know that now this does not mean anything ).
As in the case of Bounce Patrol Kids, you feel that the content of these videos is impossible to understand, it is impossible to figure out where the meaning begins and ends, who comes up with ideas and who plays them. In turn, images in popular channels under the direction of a person, such as Toy Freaks, lead to the fact that they endlessly repeat over the network in more and more outlandish forms.
This is the next level of video, described by me as a video with the participation of people who are generally much more anxious than the unpleasant actions of Toy Freaks and their relatives. Here is a relatively mild, but still frustrating example:
A step beyond the merely pirated videos of Peppa Pig, mentioned earlier, is an insult. They too abound in violence. In Peppa Pig's official videos, Peppa is really sent to the dentist, and the episode in which she does it seems to be popular - although, it is unclear what seems to be a real episode is available only on an unofficial channel. In the official version, Peppa was reassured by an amiable dentist. In the version above, she is mostly tortured before turning into the Iron Man series of robots and performing the Learn Colors dance. The search “Peppa Pig at the dentist” returns the above video on the first page, which only makes things worse.
Shocking videos of Peppa Pig, who tend to be extremely violent and fearful, with Peppa eating her father or drinking bleach , are, as it turned out, very common. They make up the entire YouTube subculture. Many obviously parodies or even satires in their own right are fairly common on the Internet and deliberately performed in an offensive and outrageous style. In all 4chan communities, there is ridiculing these videos, we know that.
In the example above, the type is less clear: the video begins with a mocking parody of Peppa, but later mixed with the automatic repetition of images that we recently saw. I do not know which camp it belongs to. Maybe it's just a parody of such cartoons, I hope so, but I'm not sure. Parodies do not cover the intersection of real actors and more automatic examples further down the line. They play here, but that's not all.
I suppose it’s naive not to see the intent of these versions, but many of them are so close to the original, and therefore not marked - as an example of a dentist - which many, many children look at them. I understand that most of them do not try to confuse children, even if it seems so.
I try to understand why, if this is a problem, why is the question "Does anyone think about children?" Obviously, this content is inappropriate, it is obvious that the actors are bad, it is obvious that most of these videos should be removed. Obviously, this also raises questions about legality of use, misappropriation, free speech, etc.
But reports that simply explain the problem through rose-colored glasses cannot fully understand what mechanisms unfold, and therefore are not able to think about the consequences of what this may lead to taking appropriate measures.
The New York Times titled its article on this issue as “On YouTube Kids , a shocking video slipped past the filters,” which emphasizes the use of fake characters and nursery rhymes in prohibited content, and calls for viewing it as a problem in the moderators and the law. YouTube Kids, the official app that claims it is safe for a child, but clearly is a problem because it fraudulently creates trust in users. An article in the British The Sun: “The children remained injured after sick clips on YouTube showing Peppa Pig characters with knives and guns appearing in the children's app,” also took the right side, adding a dose of technophobia and self-righteousness. But both stories take on YouTube as a fundamental statement that such videos are incredibly rare and are quickly removed: The allegations are completely refuted by the spread of the stories themselves and the growing number of posts on social networks, mainly from interested parents from whom they originate.
But, as in the case of Toy Freaks, what concerns me with regard to video from Peppa is how obvious parodies and even more dark fakes interact with legions of developers of algorithmic content, so far it is absolutely impossible to know what is happening. ("The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig and from pig to man again, but it is already impossible to say what it was.")
This is what a version of Toy Freaks released in Asia is (screen shot above). Here is one from Russia .I really do not want to use the term “under the direction of the person” for these videos anymore, although they contain all the same images and actual people who violate them. I no longer know what is going on here, and I really do not want it, and I start to think that this is a kind of point. This is part of why I start thinking about the awareness of all this. A lot of effort has been made to create it. And it generates income more than from spam - isn't it? Who writes these scripts by editing these videos? Once again I want to emphasize: it is still very soft, even fun stuff compared to what is there.
Here are a few things that really bother me:
First is the level of fear and violence. For a while, this is offensive; most of the time it seems deeper and more unconscious. The Internet has a way to enhance and translate many of our hidden desires; in fact, this is what seems to be done best. I spend a lot of time discussing this tendency in relation to a person’s sexual freedom, individual personality and other problems. Here, and in the overwhelming majority, it is sometimes felt that this tendency is in itself cruel and destructive.
Secondly, the levels of use are not children, because they are children, but children, because they are helpless to suggestion. Automated reward systems, such as YouTube’s algorithms, need to be used in the same way that capitalism needs material consumption, and if you are someone who opposes in the second half of this equation, then perhaps this should be what convinces you of it the truth. Operation is encoded in the systems that we build, which complicates the work, it is more difficult to think and understand what we should fight against and what to defend against. AI lords and robots in factories are not somewhere in the future, but right here, now, on your screen, in your living room and in your pocket.
Many of these latter examples contradict any attempt to argue that no one actually watches these videos, that these are all bots. People participate in this chain, at least on the production side, and I also worry about them very much.
I have written enough, too much, but I feel that I really need to justify all this nonsense about violence and abuse and automated systems with an example that sums up. Maybe after all that I said, you will not think that everything is so bad. Personally, I do not know what to think next.
This video, the BURIED ALIVE Outdoor Playground, is the Finger Family Animation Education Learning Video Songbook , contains all the elements we reviewed above and takes them to another level. Familiar characters, children's images, verbal nonsense, full automation, violence, as well as the worst desires of children. And, of course, a huge number of these videos. Channel after channel after channel of similar content, every month hundreds of new videos are released at a speed. Industrial production of nightmares.
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It’s not just child abuse that bothers me, although it directly concerns me. My opinion is that this is just one of the aspects of a kind of infrastructural violence committed to all of us, all the time, and we are still trying to find a way to talk about it, to describe the mechanisms of its work and the consequences. As I said at the beginning of this essay: this is done by people, technology, and a combination of technology and people. It is impossible to shift responsibility for someone to their results, but the damage is very, very real.
Translation: Vyacheslav Bukatov
I'm James Bridle . I am a writer and artist concerned with technology and culture. I usually write on my own blog, but honestly, I don’t want what I’m saying here is somewhere near my own site. Please note: this essay describes disturbing things and links to disturbing graphic and video content. You do not have to read this, and I recommend caution when studying.
')
As a person who grew up on the Internet, I believe that the network has had one of the most important influences on who I am today. In my room was a computer with Internet access from 13 years old. It gave me access to many things that were completely out of place for a teenager, but everything was in order. Culture, politics and interpersonal relationships, which I consider to be the main ones for my personality, were formed on the Internet in a way that I have always considered useful for myself. I have always been a critical supporter of the Internet and all that he brought, and in general I considered it emancipatory and useful. I declare this from the very beginning, because, reflecting on the consequences of the problem, I will, to a large extent, rely on my own generalizations and prejudices.
One of these hypothetical questions that I often ask myself is what I will feel when my own children have the same access to the Internet today. And I understand that the question is harder to answer. I understand that this is a natural evolution of relationships that occur with age, and at some point this question may be much less hypothetical. I do not want to be a hypocrite in this. I would like my children to have the same opportunities to explore and grow and express themselves the way I do. I wish they had that choice. And this belief broadens the attitude towards the role of the Internet in public life in general.
For a while, I was also aware of the increasingly symbiotic relationship between children and YouTube. I see that children look at the screen with enthusiasm all the time, in wheelchairs and in restaurants, and there is always a little sense of Luddism, but I am not a parent, and I do not accept parental judgments for anyone. I saw how family members and children of a friend connected to watching Peppa Pig and children's rhyme videos, and that made them happy and gave everyone a breather, so everything is fine.
But I don't even have children, and now I just want to destroy it all.
Someone or something, or some kind of amalgamation of people and things, uses YouTube to systematically scare, hurt and abuse children, automatically and on a large scale, and this causes me to question my own beliefs about the Internet at all levels. Much of what I’m going to describe next was covered elsewhere, although none of the popular highlights I saw really understood the consequences of what seems to be happening.
For starters: YouTube Kids is definitely and visibly odd. For a while I knew about this weirdness. Last year, many articles were published on Surprise Eggs. Videos from Surprise Eggs, often long and painful, show the process of unfolding Kinder and other eggs with toys. This is all the content, but the children are fascinated by it. There are hundreds and thousands of these videos and hundreds and thousands, if not millions, of children watching them.
From the article above :
The creator of my favorite videos is “Blu Toys Surprise Brinquedos & Juegos”, and since 2010 he has gained 3.7 million subscribers and a little less than 6 billion views on a children's channel completely dedicated to the opening of surprise toys and unpacking toys. The titles of the video are a pattern of obscure brand names and linking: “Surprise Play Doh Eggs Peppa Pig Stamper Cars Pocoyo Minecraft Smurfs Kinder Play Doh Sparkle Brilho” , “Cars Screamin` Banshee Eats Lightning McQueen Disney Pixar” , “Disney Baby Pop Up Pals Easter Eggs” SURPRISE. ”
When I wrote this, he made a total of 4,426 videos. For comparison, with so many views - the official channel of Justin Bieber has more than 10 billion views, while full-time star YouTube PewDiePie has almost 12 billion - it’s likely that this person makes a living with a pair of gently mumbling hands that unfold eggs Kinder. (Video from Surprise-egg is accompanied by preroll, and sometimes midrolls and advertising.)
This should give you some insight into how strange the world of children's online video is, and this list of videos hints at the extreme size and complexity of this situation. It looks harmless, but after a couple of minutes you will understand that this is part of some rather strange garbage.
Another huge image, especially for the youngest children, is children's rhymed videos.
Little Baby Bum , which made the above video, is the 7th most popular channel on YouTube. In just 515 videos, they scored 11.5 million subscribers and 13 billion views . Again, there are questions about the accuracy of these numbers, which I will soon receive, but the key point is that it is a huge, huge network and industry.
The video is a lure for parents and for children, and therefore for content creators and advertisers. Small children are hypnotized by these videos, whether they are familiar characters and songs, or just bright colors and soothing sounds. The length of many of these videos is one common goal of a video to collect a variety of poems for children or cartoons in watch collections - and, thus, length positions as part of the appeal of the video, indicating the amount of time some children spend with it.
Thus, the leading channels on YouTube have developed a huge number of tactics to attract the attention of parents and children to their videos, as well as advertising revenues that accompany them. The first of these tactics is simply copying and pirating other content. A simple search for “Peppa Pig” on YouTube in my case gave “about 10,400,000 results”, the first page consists almost entirely of videos from the official channel “Peppa Pig Official Channel”, and one of the videos from the unofficial channel called Play Go Toys, which you really wouldn't notice if you weren't looking for him:
The Play Go Toys channel consists of (I guess?) Pirated content from Peppa Pig and other cartoons, a video with toy boxing (another magnet for children) and, presumably, a video with the channel’s own children. I do not say anything bad about Play Go Toys; I just show how the YouTube structure makes it easier for the content and author bundles, and how it affects our awareness and trust in its source.
As another blogger notes, one of the traditional roles of proprietary content is that he is a trusted source. Whether it is Peppa Pig on the children's channel or Disney movies, whatever their feelings about the industrial model of entertainment, they are carefully thought out and controlled so that the children are essentially safe, looking at them and can be trusted. This no longer works when the brand and content are not connected by the platform, and so well-known and reliable content provides a seamless gateway for untested and potentially harmful content.
(Yes, this is the same process as splitting up reliable media in Facebook feeds and Google results , which are currently causing such damage to our educational and political systems, and I will not explicitly explore these relationships further now, but this is obvious , is of great importance.)
The second way to increase the number of video views is through a keyword / hashtag association, which in itself is a whole dark art. When a trend, such as Surprise Egg videos, reaches a critical mass, content producers lean on it, creating hundreds and thousands of these videos in any possible quantity. This is the source of all the strange names in the list above: corporate content and nursery rhyme names and “surprise egg”, all stuffed into a salad of similar words to capture search results, placement on the side panels and “up” rating for autoplay.
A prime example of strangeness is the Finger Family video (a harmless example inserted above). I have no idea where they came from, and the origin of the nursery rhyme at the base of the images, but YouTube has at least 17 million versions , and they again cover all possible genres: with a total of billions of views.
Again, the number of views on these videos should have been taken under serious control. A huge number of these videos are mainly created by bots and viewed by bots, and even commented on by bots. This is a whole strange world in itself. But we should not hide the fact that there are also many real children immersed in iPhones and tablets, they watch it again and again - partly, given the increased number of views - they are taught to type the main search terms in the browser or simply scroll through the sidebar to enable another video.
What I find somewhat disturbing about the distribution of normal (relatively) normal children's videos is the inability to determine the degree of automation that works here; how to understand the gap between man and machine. The example above, from a channel called Bounce Patrol Kids, with almost two million subscribers, demonstrates this effect in action. They publish professionally created videos with real actors, about one video a week. Once again, I do not say anything bad about Bounce Patrol, which clearly follow in the footsteps of pre-digital children's sensations, like their Australian colleagues The Wiggles .
And yet there is something strange about a group of people who act endlessly regardless of the combination of algorithmically generated keywords: “Halloween Finger Family & more Halloween Songs for Children | Kids Halloween Songs Collection ”,“ Australian Animals Finger Family Song | Finger Family Nursery Rhymes ”,“ Farm Animals Finger Family and more Animals Songs | Finger Family Collection - Learn Animals Sounds ”,“ Safari Animals Finger Family Song | Elephant, Lion, Giraffe, Zebra & Hippo! Wild Animals for kids ”,“ Superheroes Finger Family and more Finger Family Songs! Superhero Finger Family Collection ”,“ Batman Finger Family Song - Superheroes and Villains! Batman, Joker, Riddler, Catwoman ”and on and on. This production of content in the era of algorithmic discovery — even if you are human, you must ultimately personalize the machine.
Other channels abandoned real actors to create endless reconfigurable versions of the same videos over and over. What is happening here is clearly automated. Stock animations, soundtracks, and lists of thousands of keywords create an endless stream of video. The aforementioned channel, Videogyan 3D Rhymes - Nursery Rhymes & Baby Songs , posts several videos a week, using more byzantium in keyword combinations. They have almost five million subscribers — more than double the Bounce Patrol — although I’ll say it again — it’s impossible to know who or what actually does these millions and millions of views.
I try not to turn this essay into an endless list of examples, but it is important to understand how extensive this system is and how uncertain its actions, process and audience are. It also has an international character: there are variations of the Finger Family and Learn Colors for the Tamil epics and Malaysian cartoons that are unlikely to appear in the search results in the English version. This uncertainty and reach are key to its existence and its consequences. Its dimension makes it difficult to understand.
We have come across very clear examples of the alarming results of full automation before that - some of them were fortunately left with dark humor, others - not so much. Much has been done with the help of algorithmic crosses of libraries of stock photos and at the request of production, everything from t-shirts to mugs, from children's overalls to phone cases. The above example, available until recently on Amazon, is one such case, and the story of how this happened is fascinating and strange, but essentially understandable . Nobody was going to create phone covers with drugs and medical equipment on them, it was just a very strange mathematical / probabilistic result. The fact that it took some time to notice may cause some alarm calls.
Similarly, the keep Calm and Rape A Lot t-shirts (along with Keep Calm and Knife Her and Keep Calm and Hit Her) are depressing and sad, but it's pretty clear that no one was going to create these shirts: they just tied an uncontrollable list of verbs and pronouns using an online image generator. It is possible that none of these T-shirts that have ever physically existed have ever been bought or worn, and therefore there was no harm. Again, the people creating this content did not notice, and the distributor did nothing. They literally had no idea what they were doing .
What I’ll be arguing about, based on these cases and those I’ll talk about next, is that the scale and logic of the system are complicit in these results and require us to analyze their consequences.
(Again, I’m not going to delve into the broader social implications of such processes beyond what I’m writing here, but it is clear that a clear line can be drawn from such examples as pressing contemporary issues, such as racial and gender bias in large data systems and machine systems that require urgent attention, but in the same way have nothing like simple or even preferred solutions.)
Let's look at only one video among a pile of video for children and try to figure out where it came from. It is important to emphasize that I was not going to find this video: it turned out to be higher in rating when searching for “finger family” in incognito mode (that is, the previous search should not affect it). This automation leads us to very, very strange places, and at this moment the rabbit hole is so deep that it is impossible to understand how this happened.
Once again, a warning about the content: this video is not entirely inappropriate, but it is clearly disabled and contains elements that may disturb someone. It is very soft on the scale of such things, but. I write this below if you do not want to watch it and go along this road. This warning will be repeated.
The aforementioned video is called Nursery Rhymes . The name confirms its automatic origin. I have no idea where the expression “Wrong Heads” comes from, but I can imagine that, like with the song Finger Family, somewhere there is a completely original and harmless version that the children laughed at after being processed by the algorithm to the list of words that are incoherent with each other, in combination with “Learn Colors”, “Finger Family” and “Nursery Rhymes”, and all these combinations — not just as words, but as images, processes and actions — are mixed with what we see here.
The video consists of the usual version of the song Finger Family, performed on top of the animation of the heads changing and intersecting the heads and bodies of the characters from Disney's Aladin. Again, this is strange, but, frankly, no more than Surprise Egg videos or anything else that children watch. I understand how innocent it is. The discrepancy is accompanied by the appearance of a non-Baldadian character, Agni, a little girl from Despicable Me. Agnes is the arbiter of the scene: when the heads do not coincide, she cries, when they coincide, she rejoices.
The creator of the video, BABYFUN TV (screenshot above), released a lot of similar videos. Like many of the videos with the wrong mix of heads that I could watch, they worked the same way. Cartoon Character Puzzle cries when changing heads of Trolls and Smurfs between themselves. It goes on and on. I see it as a game, but the constant imposition and mixing of different types gradually penetrates into us. BABYFUN TV has only 170 subscribers and a very low number of views, but there are thousands and thousands of such channels. The numbers in this long tail are insignificant in the abstract sense, but their number is significant .
The question arises: how did this happen? The image of “Bad Baby”, also present on the BABYFUN channel, has the same crying. While I find it disturbing, I can understand that this may provide some rhythm or attitude to their own experiences, as real children are involved in the content of the video. Although it was stretched and distorted by algorithmic repetition and recombination in such a way that I do not think that anyone wants this to happen to him.
Toy Freaks is an extremely popular channel ( 68th on the platform ), in which the father and his two daughters act out - or, in some cases, perhaps act like they were in life - like many of the images that we have highlighted before, including “Bad Baby”, above. Like nursery rhymes and flower teaching, Toy Freaks specializes in abusive situations, as well as in other genres, many people watching this channel are on the edge of their outrage, if they don’t go beyond it, seeing videos with how disgusting children behave, Toy Freaks - This is an approved YouTube channel, whatever that means. (I think we know that now this does not mean anything ).
As in the case of Bounce Patrol Kids, you feel that the content of these videos is impossible to understand, it is impossible to figure out where the meaning begins and ends, who comes up with ideas and who plays them. In turn, images in popular channels under the direction of a person, such as Toy Freaks, lead to the fact that they endlessly repeat over the network in more and more outlandish forms.
This is the next level of video, described by me as a video with the participation of people who are generally much more anxious than the unpleasant actions of Toy Freaks and their relatives. Here is a relatively mild, but still frustrating example:
A step beyond the merely pirated videos of Peppa Pig, mentioned earlier, is an insult. They too abound in violence. In Peppa Pig's official videos, Peppa is really sent to the dentist, and the episode in which she does it seems to be popular - although, it is unclear what seems to be a real episode is available only on an unofficial channel. In the official version, Peppa was reassured by an amiable dentist. In the version above, she is mostly tortured before turning into the Iron Man series of robots and performing the Learn Colors dance. The search “Peppa Pig at the dentist” returns the above video on the first page, which only makes things worse.
Shocking videos of Peppa Pig, who tend to be extremely violent and fearful, with Peppa eating her father or drinking bleach , are, as it turned out, very common. They make up the entire YouTube subculture. Many obviously parodies or even satires in their own right are fairly common on the Internet and deliberately performed in an offensive and outrageous style. In all 4chan communities, there is ridiculing these videos, we know that.
In the example above, the type is less clear: the video begins with a mocking parody of Peppa, but later mixed with the automatic repetition of images that we recently saw. I do not know which camp it belongs to. Maybe it's just a parody of such cartoons, I hope so, but I'm not sure. Parodies do not cover the intersection of real actors and more automatic examples further down the line. They play here, but that's not all.
I suppose it’s naive not to see the intent of these versions, but many of them are so close to the original, and therefore not marked - as an example of a dentist - which many, many children look at them. I understand that most of them do not try to confuse children, even if it seems so.
I try to understand why, if this is a problem, why is the question "Does anyone think about children?" Obviously, this content is inappropriate, it is obvious that the actors are bad, it is obvious that most of these videos should be removed. Obviously, this also raises questions about legality of use, misappropriation, free speech, etc.
But reports that simply explain the problem through rose-colored glasses cannot fully understand what mechanisms unfold, and therefore are not able to think about the consequences of what this may lead to taking appropriate measures.
The New York Times titled its article on this issue as “On YouTube Kids , a shocking video slipped past the filters,” which emphasizes the use of fake characters and nursery rhymes in prohibited content, and calls for viewing it as a problem in the moderators and the law. YouTube Kids, the official app that claims it is safe for a child, but clearly is a problem because it fraudulently creates trust in users. An article in the British The Sun: “The children remained injured after sick clips on YouTube showing Peppa Pig characters with knives and guns appearing in the children's app,” also took the right side, adding a dose of technophobia and self-righteousness. But both stories take on YouTube as a fundamental statement that such videos are incredibly rare and are quickly removed: The allegations are completely refuted by the spread of the stories themselves and the growing number of posts on social networks, mainly from interested parents from whom they originate.
But, as in the case of Toy Freaks, what concerns me with regard to video from Peppa is how obvious parodies and even more dark fakes interact with legions of developers of algorithmic content, so far it is absolutely impossible to know what is happening. ("The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig and from pig to man again, but it is already impossible to say what it was.")
This is what a version of Toy Freaks released in Asia is (screen shot above). Here is one from Russia .I really do not want to use the term “under the direction of the person” for these videos anymore, although they contain all the same images and actual people who violate them. I no longer know what is going on here, and I really do not want it, and I start to think that this is a kind of point. This is part of why I start thinking about the awareness of all this. A lot of effort has been made to create it. And it generates income more than from spam - isn't it? Who writes these scripts by editing these videos? Once again I want to emphasize: it is still very soft, even fun stuff compared to what is there.
Here are a few things that really bother me:
First is the level of fear and violence. For a while, this is offensive; most of the time it seems deeper and more unconscious. The Internet has a way to enhance and translate many of our hidden desires; in fact, this is what seems to be done best. I spend a lot of time discussing this tendency in relation to a person’s sexual freedom, individual personality and other problems. Here, and in the overwhelming majority, it is sometimes felt that this tendency is in itself cruel and destructive.
Secondly, the levels of use are not children, because they are children, but children, because they are helpless to suggestion. Automated reward systems, such as YouTube’s algorithms, need to be used in the same way that capitalism needs material consumption, and if you are someone who opposes in the second half of this equation, then perhaps this should be what convinces you of it the truth. Operation is encoded in the systems that we build, which complicates the work, it is more difficult to think and understand what we should fight against and what to defend against. AI lords and robots in factories are not somewhere in the future, but right here, now, on your screen, in your living room and in your pocket.
Many of these latter examples contradict any attempt to argue that no one actually watches these videos, that these are all bots. People participate in this chain, at least on the production side, and I also worry about them very much.
I have written enough, too much, but I feel that I really need to justify all this nonsense about violence and abuse and automated systems with an example that sums up. Maybe after all that I said, you will not think that everything is so bad. Personally, I do not know what to think next.
This video, the BURIED ALIVE Outdoor Playground, is the Finger Family Animation Education Learning Video Songbook , contains all the elements we reviewed above and takes them to another level. Familiar characters, children's images, verbal nonsense, full automation, violence, as well as the worst desires of children. And, of course, a huge number of these videos. Channel after channel after channel of similar content, every month hundreds of new videos are released at a speed. Industrial production of nightmares.
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It’s not just child abuse that bothers me, although it directly concerns me. My opinion is that this is just one of the aspects of a kind of infrastructural violence committed to all of us, all the time, and we are still trying to find a way to talk about it, to describe the mechanisms of its work and the consequences. As I said at the beginning of this essay: this is done by people, technology, and a combination of technology and people. It is impossible to shift responsibility for someone to their results, but the damage is very, very real.
Translation: Vyacheslav Bukatov
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/342168/
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