I wonder to what extent this YouTube Kids stuff represents a "moral panic" --- oh no, look at the depraved things our children are watching! And they are TEACHING an ALGORITHM to learn that LIVE CHILD ACTORS should be made to act out even more depraved versions of these things to get more page views!

Versus a real problem -- oh shit, we accidentally created a brand new Internet where there are no more editors, everyone is free to find their own content democratically, hooray, but some of the people we put in charge of creating that content are hyperactive amoral entities.

I know a bunch of Facebook employees have this view of the whole "filter bubble", "fake news" situation which is, more or less -- Deal With It. The news feed algorithm is here to stay, it's the new printing press, editors are obsolete, and everyone gets to decide their own truth now. That view is evinced ambivalently at e.g. https://www.wired.com/story/the-solution-to-facebook-overloa... .

But I'm not sure how that view copes with the YouTube monetization model which .... starts with children's videos ... goes to ad revenue ... and leads to children being videotaped apparently in real distress for money.

Here are 2 points of reference:

(1) YouTube channel "DaddyOfFive" had 750,000+ subscribers and featured what was fairly clearly child abuse ("pranks"). Somebody finally thought it might be a good idea to report this to authorities and the father lost custody of some of the children. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2017/04...

(2) The comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14910125 links to an article at https://vigilantcitizen.com/moviesandtv/something-is-terribl... which provides some evidence that toddlers' content preferences are influencing the creation of new content which involves, as part of making the content, putting children in distress. This seems to cause actual measurable harm to children.

The news.ycombinator comment said in part :

> The feedback loop is so tight that many of the creators have converged on designing some of the most visceral (and disturbing) material that appeals to kids at a reptilian level. Think about how genuinely weird little kids are. Sometimes they do stuff that would be scary if it wasn't just a minute of innocent pretend and a toy. Stuff like kidnapping each other or performing surgery on each other. Well, now there are hundreds of thousands of YT videos illustrating that kind of material in fine detail. Many of them have millions of views.

And the sample videos' captions include:

> Many videos feature the girls screaming or crying their heart out. In this video, this girl has something in her mouth that tastes horrible … And she’s forced to keep it in her mouth … And she doesn’t seem to be acting.

> Here, a girl takes something from the toilet and force feeds it to the other girl. She doesn’t like this.

> In another video, a creepy dude with clown makeup barges into the girls’ house and starts grabbing them while the girls scream and attempt to resist him.

Is this wrong? Should this not be happening? Is this anything but a natural effect of the 2010-2011 "filter bubble" and the 2016 "fake news" phenomena?