BOSTON -- YouTube Kids is getting an overhaul, scrapping millions of videos and giving parents new controls after being dogged by complaints about inappropriate content slipping past its filters.
Boston 25 News reporter Jacqui Heinrich first investigated the problem, known as Elsa Gate, last month.
"When I had put something on the screen it was Elsa and Ana, and I came in to see what I was hearing and it was Elsa delivering a baby for Ana,” local mom Jennifer McLean told Heinrich at the time. “Just totally inappropriate it was like she was on a table, legs spread.”
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McLean is now one of many critical voices YouTube is responding to with the changes.
Bad actors have been flooding the kids’ video platform with sexual and violent content, all to shock young viewers. Up until now, it’s been an uphill battle for YouTube, trying to remove bad content as quickly as its being uploaded.
“A lot of the videos seemed to start off as very kid friendly and then all of a sudden turn into something very inappropriate. So it was 100 percent intentional,” McLean said.
YouTube has now scaled back its use of machines to filter out drugs, violence, and sex from the kids platform, and added a new feature where parents can have humans, rather than computers, select suggested videos for their kids to watch.
The company has also removed eight million inappropriate videos from the app, but noted that 6.7 million of those were first flagged by machines. Seventy-six percent were deleted before they got a single view. But the response is timely, as law enforcement officials warn that unregulated online spaces can become dangerous for kids.
“If there's talk of whether they want to meet, or say go to this other website where there may be a web cam, or an email pops up where there may be communication with a child,” Detective Lieutenant Matthew Murphy of the Mass State Police Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force said.
YouTube published the numbers in an effort to show its struggle to respond to the problem quickly enough to satisfy advertisers and regulators, as more than 400 hours of content are uploaded every minute.
Although the default setting still has computers curate video suggestions, concerned parents can now elect to have a human hand select them, which they say can be more personalized.
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