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 is filled with advertisements for toys and anti-socialist propaganda. Not to mention how John Stossel got ABC and 20/20 to sponsor libertarian educational videos for schools, or how Prager U is making its way into the classroom. If TV is replaced with complete nonsense, like many of these YouTube videos, I'm not sure which is worse.
I presume there is a long-term study on the effects of this media on children - many parents, in the USA at least, use YouTube as a babysitter for children that are far too young. I'm interested in the effects on attention span, or how Youtuber is the most common career goal for kids now. I wonder how they will react after realizing it is very hard to make a living doing it in a saturated market.
This one isn't too surprising. Kids don't really know about career options (hence the need for career days), so when you ask them what they want to be they gravitate towards stuff that's visible to them. This is part of why plenty of kids follow their parents' career footsteps almost by default -- it's probably the job they have the most information about.