YouTube Kids is massively popular and also the actual worst content the world has to offer. The most successful content, racking up hundreds of millions of views, is extremely vapid and just consists of sounds and colours punctuated by disguised adverts for expensive toys. No narrative, no speech, nothing educational. Kids are so malleable and early development is so important, yet a sizeable chunk are watching people in knock-off Spider-Man costumes unwrap toys and chase around knock-off Elsas all day. I won’t even get into the unsettling uncanny valley side of things and the creepy procedurally generated animation on there.
I’m genuinely concerned about kids being brought up on what is essentially mental junk food through their most formative years. I’m not saying they all need to be listening to violin concertos all day, but I feel that when I was a kid straight up garbage like this didn’t even exist and every kids show had at least something you could learn from it, like Sesame Street, or was decently produced entertainment, like Pokemon. This has a quarter of a billion views and it’s just... nothing.
TV has always been trash and Online TV is just more of the same.
I'm no more worried about a kid in the '20s being radicalized by YouTube than I am of a kind in the '90s being radicalized by Crossfire or GI Joe.
It's kids having fun in a big house with their dad and their cool toys. The 6-year-old equivalent of watching Twitch streams. The most inoffensive banal white noise imaginable for someone to watch.
That's just television, generally speaking. I agree its toxic to sit in front of a screen and absorb images/noises continuously for hours a day. But the history of latch-key kids is long, and this particular brand of bland consumerist crap isn't materially worse than what we grew up with in the 80s or 00s. Go back and watch Teletubies or Barney. It's basically the same shit.