Picture of the Week: Elsagate

I was at someone's house and a little girl was watching a video on a phone with the volume kind of loud.  So I leaned over her shoulder to see what was on Youtube and I was pretty shocked by what I saw.

That is an Elsagate video. What is Elsagate you ask?

Elsagate is a neologism referring to the controversy surrounding videos on  and YouTube Kids that are categorized as "child-friendly," but which contain themes that are inappropriate for children. Most videos under this classification are notable for presenting content such as violence, sexual situations, fetishes, drugs, alcohol, injections, toilet humor, and dangerous or upsetting situations and activities.

The videos often feature popular characters from family-oriented media, sometimes via crossovers, used without legal permission; the term itself is composed of Elsa (a character from the Disney animated film Frozen, who is frequently depicted in such videos) and -gate (a suffix for scandals). However, the Elsagatecontroversy has also included channels such as Toy Freaks that do not feature child-/family-friendly characters but real children, and have raised concern about possible child abuse. 

Most videos in this category are either live action films or crude digital animations, although a few channels have been using more elaborate techniques such as clay animation. Despite YouTube's age restriction policies, these videos are sometimes tagged in such a way to circumvent the inbuilt child safety algorithms, even making their way into YouTube Kids, and are thus difficult to moderate due to the large scale of the platform. In order to capture search results and attract attention from users, their titles and descriptions feature names of famous characters, as well as keywords like "education," "learn colors," "nursery rhymes," etc. They also include automatically-placed ads, making them lucrative to their owners and YouTube. Despite the objectionable and often confusing nature of these videos, many attract millions of views.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate

In a nutshell these are videos directed towards children featuring well-known characters involved in inappropriate situations that are not child friendly. In the video the little girl was watching a pregnant mermaid was put in jail by a witch and two sisters were fighting over the same witch's broomstick with both sisters ending up bloody.  The background music was a loud pop song before it switched to a tranquil version of London Bridge is Falling Down.  That is as much as I saw before mom snatched the phone away so she could make a call.

I have read about these videos before and watched a few but never did I think I would see a child actually watching one. What this means is that mom and dad don't know what their little girl is watching on Youtube. They are handing her the phone and using it as a babysitter. 

Obviously this kind of situation is not unique to the Philippines. But here is the thing. Mark Zuckerberg has used the Philippines as a testing ground to roll out free Facebook an internet access to the entire nation. That has radically changed the way people communicate with each other and experience the internet. I would be surprised if this little girl does not have a Facebook page already. Surely her mom has posted photos of her since birth. By handing off her device to her daughter mom is already conditioning her to being a netizen and that is absolutely not a good thing. Mom doesn't even have a clue. She doesn't know what her girl is watching on Youtube and goodness knows what online shenanigans this girl will become involved with in the future.