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YouTube videos using child-oriented search terms are evading the company’s attempts to control them. In one cartoon, a woman with a Minnie Mouse head tumbles down an escalator before becoming trapped in its machinery, spurting blood, while her children (baby Mickey and Minnie characters) cry.
The cartoon, Minnie Mouse Mommy Has Pregnancy Problem & Doctor Treats Episodes! Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck Cartoon, racked up over three million views in a single day. It could be viewed even with YouTube’s family-friendly restricted mode enabled and existed, along with plenty of similarly distressing content, on Simple Fun, a channel that had been in operation since July 2017.
The channel has now been removed by YouTube “due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube’s policy against spam, deceptive practices and misleading content or other Terms of Service violations.”
WIRED found videos containing violence against child characters, age-inappropriate sexualisation, Paw Patrol characters attempting suicide and Peppa Pig being tricked into eating bacon. These were discovered by following recommendations in YouTube’s sidebar or simply allowing children’s videos to autoplay, starting with legitimate content.
Recommendations are designed to optimize watch time, there is no reason that it shows content that is actually good for kids. It might sometimes, but if it does it is coincidence,” says former YouTube engineer Guillaume Chaslot, who founded , a project that aims to highlight and explain the impact of algorithms in determining what we see online. “Working at YouTube on recommendations, I felt I was the bad guy in Pinocchio: showing kids a colourful and fun world, but actually turning them into donkeys to maximise revenue.”
The videos WIRED found were reported to YouTube and were removed or restricted by the Google-owned company before the publication of this article. The company explained that it is increasing its efforts to control content that violates its terms and conditions.
YouTube is home to millions of hours of children’s entertainment – part of the 400 hours of video uploaded to the service every minute – ranging from and Disney to the incomprehensibly successful Little Baby Bum, a UK-based YouTube-native children’s channel devoted to 3D animated songs and nursery rhymes for pre-schoolers in numerous languages.
ontent for pre-school children, in particular, can be lucrative for ad-funded channels, as small children will readily watch and poke at whatever videos YouTube suggests, while harried parents are often unable to fully supervise every minute of their child’s media consumption.
AlgoTransparency regularly indexes the kids’ videos most likely to berecommended by YouTube. Its lists show that YouTube’s most-suggested children’s videos lean disproportionately towards a combination of YouTube-native songs and nursery rhymes designed for a US audience; long edited-together compilations of TV series such as Peppa Pig, and strange, low-budget 2D and 3D animated mash-ups of animals, characters and voice samples.
Previously described in James Bridle’s Something is wrong on the internet Medium post as “decidedly off”, the latter type of content can be loosely and collectively categorised as ‘weird children’s YouTube’.
Titles are typically a word salad designed to attract children’s and parents’ searches, while the videos’ content leans heavily on generic 2D or 3D animated models, usually incongruously combined with familiar figures from hit Disney or superhero franchises. The sheer number of them on the platform is staggering, and many have millions or even hundreds of millions of views.
The video Disney Frozen Finger Family Collection Disney Frozen Finger Family Songs Nursery Rhymes has 43m views, while LEARN COLOR BMX & MotorCycles JUMP! for kids w/ Superheroes Cartoon for children Nursery rhymes has 176m.
Neither video contains any content more distressing than badly-animated video and the intensely annoying Finger Family song, but both are good examples of videos that use popular franchises and the promise of education to target searches that parents and children are likely to carry out.
Based on what YouTube insiders have said about how its suggestion engine works, racking up high view counts and minutes watched makes it all the more likely that videos will be recommended to others.
The video ᴴᴰ Mickey Mouse & Minnie Mouse Exercise fat lamps Funny Story 💗 Cartoon for Kids by Mickey Mouse is a lot closer to the uncanny valley, has over a million views and was among the videos AlgoTransparency identified as highly likely to be recommended during searches for children’s content at the beginning of March.
Once you’re into the realm of weird and keyword-packed attempts at creating recommendation-optimised videos, it’s almost inevitable that you’ll run into content that most parents would rather not expose very young children to.
By clicking on content from YouTube’s suggested video bar, we went – via weird children’s YouTube – from an entirely legitimate CBeebies video to a low-budget Paw Patrol rip-off showing one of the series’ canine heroes attempting suicide by jumping off a building… in thirteen clicks.
A random browsing test with a toddler (who wasn’t actually shown any unpleasant content) took us from YouTube-native children’s favourite Bob the Train to, a few stubby-fingered lunges at the tablet screen later, a fake Mickey Mouse cartoon with depictions of eye-gouging, a parasite-infested stomach and small children setting each other on fire.
High viewer counts are a common feature of this more distressing content, too. The parasites-and-eye-gouging video, titled ᴴᴰ Mickey Mouse Babies Crying because of Grub in Belly! Finger Family Song Nursery Rhymes racked up 20,218,533 views in two days before we reported it.
artoons Sun & Moon Babies Love Story! Mickey Mouse & Minnie Mouse Sexy Girls Pole Dancing – which isn’t as bad as it sounds – has been seen over 12m times. Paw Patrol Cartoons Skye Scorpion Bites in Halloween Holiday! Finger Family Song Nursery Rhymes – which includes a brawl and a depiction of one of the cartoon characters mourning over his friend’s grave – was at over 11m.
