Children’s media specialists are sounding the alarm over AI YouTube videos that are supposed to be “educational” but are harmful.
Children’s media specialists are sounding the alarm over AI YouTube videos that are supposed to be “educational” but are harmful.
Constant parental supervision is bad for kids and bad for childhood. But somehow we’ve created an Internet so hostile to children that we actually EXPECT 100% parental supervision. We act like it’s normal to expect parents to “always watch what their kids are doing online” as if 100% supervision was ever part of good parenting. We deserve a better internet, not more parental supervision. We should be able to control our algorithms and help our children manage theirs, not have our children’s attention spans monetized and diverted by the billionaire class. People tend to blame parents when it’s corporations who created this insanely hostile space which damages us and our children.
Indeed, it is aggressively hostile. I thought setting up an allowlist of subscribed channels would be a simple ask. That plus an adblocker and job done, right? No, Google’s algorithm is what you get–despite your subscriptions you will get plenty of other things and they will push your kid towards some inappropriate things.
What I do instead is block YouTube on my kid’s devices and download selected videos to host on Jellyfin. It’s a bit of a pain and not legal, but much better than trying to monitor YouTube use.