235
YouTube’s Deliberate Indifference Exposes Kids to disgusting Content
(www.youtube.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
235 points (91.5% liked)
Technology
71355 readers
3455 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
There can absolutely be educational content for kids on YT, but compared to the egregious amount of mind-numbing/fetishy content, it's totally not worth it. It's a shame how there feels like a lack/decline of quality kids/tween TV shows being broadcasted, I was talking to my mom about how kids really don't have a lot to watch once they hit age 9+.
In the time I allowed my kids to have YT kids, I did not encounter the content you speak of. I know there's good content on YouTube, I watch it all the time. But I never saw anything good come up in the YouTube kids app. And we had it for a while.
Well I'm mostly thinking about how my teachers would make us watch a YT vid with a classwork/homework assignment. CrashCourse does like every subject, I watched several of their Civics & Government/History videos. Amoeba Sisters was a frequent channel in my Biology class.
But the whole point is you have to look for those, cause YT knows they can get way more kids to scroll and watch ads for 5 hrs+ if you show them "ElSa pOoPiNg oN SpIDeRmAn!1!1?!?1?" videos compared to “Learn about how carbon affects the pH of seawater!". The algorithm is designed to trap unfortunately, and YT kids is a fucking sham.
Yeah I mean if a parent was always curing the content, it could be useful. But to me that's the same as not letting them have it, you just put on some YouTube videos every so often for them that you choose on your device (we do this now, I just don't allow it on their devices).
How do I has a parent curate content? I have not found anything that lets me allows the good. Either I block youtube completely, or I get what google decides is good for my kids (which blocks things I find good while allowing the bad)
Exactly. The only way is to block it and then choose something on your device whenever you want to show them something, and never let them use it without you choosing the content. The algorithm will always lead them to the darkest bowels of garbage content in my experience.
Make a new account and see what the suggestions turn into.
Edit: Missed that you were talking about educational content, so this is more about entertainment, though quite a few of the shows in the linked post touch on social lessons that are, in my opinion at least, also important for kids to learn. Acceptance, open-mindedness, self-expression, that sort of thing.
There's a post I ran across a while back that might be what you're looking for: https://lemmy.world/post/30235633
There are a lot of good shows for kids that age (and the adults watching along with them), they just tend to not be all that well known. There are also a decent number of older cartoons not in that list that are kid-friendly while being just genuinely good art; off the top of my head:
Because I'm slightly an animation dork, I'd also personally include Batman The Animated Series and Batman Beyond. Mostly just standard-but-high-quality action cartoons, but both occasionally did some really impressive artistic stuff, especially TAS.
I totally agree with the lists mentioned in that post, as my sister and I watched a good amount of them. But like my post said, there's a decline in good TV shows for kids. All of those shows mentioned are finished, none of them are currently ongoing shows right? Do they still broadcast them? Now parents have to pay for Disney+ to have something that isn't slop for their kids to watch.
Honestly, I haven't followed the state of Western animation much the last few years, so I can believe that there are fewer good shows than there used to be.
That said, animation is extremely expensive to produce for the amount of media it creates. Combine that with creative writing (well, art in general) being very under-appreciated, and therefore poorly-paid-for, there are a lot of societal/business pressures working against shows like this being produced. I only bring that up because people being unwilling to pay for non-slop is a big contributor to the problem.
(Not to defend Disney or the other mega-corps nickel-and-diming us for shareholder profits, of course. If only these companies would use their billions to fund shows from enthusiastic new creators rather than dumping everything into forgettable live-action remakes and CEO bonuses >_>)