YouTube has been making a lot of changes the past months. The Collections feature would be discontinued by tomorrow, May 20. Earlier in February, YouTube rolled out a Kids app version in the US only but a few months later, advocacy groups are urging the FTC to investigate the said app for deceptive ads. We didn’t here any comment from YouTube regarding the issue and now it’s being criticized for inappropriate content.
The Youtube Kids app is once again the subject of a complaint to the FTC from from child and consumer advocacy groups who said that the app contains jokes about pedophilia and explicit sexual language. This shouldn’t be happening since the kid’s app was aimed for the young children. Only appropriate content for kids must be found but apparently, there are some videos that are disturbing and harmful for your children. This shouldn’t be because this app is supposed to be kid-friendly.
Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and the Center for Digital Democracy sent a letter of complaint to the Federal Trade Commission saying there were inappropriate videos and asked for the FTC to start an investigation because marketing seems to be deceptive. Videos not good for kids include jokes about drug use and pedophilia, explicit sexual language in cartoons, discussion about pornography, violence, child suicide, and more.
The advocacy groups even managed to send FTC a video compilation to show how inappropriate they are. The FTC is already reviewing the matter according to a sposkeman but no word if the the actual kid’s app is being investigated or just the complaints sent by the groups.
This inappropriate content showing on search results could be a simple bug. Google has several algorithms and programs to do filter search so it should be easy to solve. Flagging videos for now can be helpful so if you’re always on YouTube, make sure you help flag those videos you think are not good for kids to watch.
Google was clear at first that search would be 100% accurate when searching YouTube, especially the kids app. Search function can be turned off though to make sure your kid isn’t trying to swipe, click, search, and play content you don’t want to see or hear.
SOURCE: WSJ
