YouTube Kids Has Been Suggesting Conspiracy Videos To Children

We have heard that YouTube plans on bringing on board more human moderators to its platform, where instead of relying purely on their filters, these human moderators will catch to help content that might have slipped past. However it seems that YouTube definitely needs to step things up, according to a report from Business Insider.

According to the report, it seems that the supposedly “safe” YouTube Kids app has been showing children conspiracy videos. YouTube Kids, for those unfamiliar, is basically YouTube that has been heavily filtered and sorted where it will only display content that is deemed suitable for children, which conspiracy videos are clearly not.

Business Insider cites an example where searching for “UFO” should have returned child-friendly results, like videos on UFO toys, cartoons, and so on. However the top video that was shown was an alleged UFO shooting at a chemtrail, along with several videos posted by conspiracy theorists. Given how impressionable children are, this is obviously a rather bad idea.

YouTube has acknowledge the gaffe in a statement which reads, “The YouTube Kids app is home to a wide variety of content that includes enriching and entertaining videos for families. This content is screened using human trained systems. That being said, no system is perfect and sometimes we miss the mark. When we do, we take immediate action to block the videos or, as necessary, channels from appearing in the app. We will continue to work to improve the YouTube Kids app experience.”

So if there was ever a time to quickly start bringing more human moderators on board, now would be a good time as any to do so.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: YouTube