It is a good step towards myth-busting the idea that phones cause some kind of brain drain. Frankly, the thing people do not want to admit is that it’s not the PHONES that cause the brain drain, it’s the way the largest social apps are incentivized to ensure your captured attention. Naturally, it is capitalism that’s the problem. I was just having this conversation recently in regard to YouTube Kids:

• YouTube’s only motivation is to ensure high impressions on ads sold on their platform as it is their primary form of revenue.
• A YouTuber’s only motivation is views, which directly translate into ad impressions of which they receive a cut.
  • In spite of this, ad impressions are actually one of the smallest portions of a YouTuber’s money stream, and one of the highest is sponsorships.
  • Sponsorships are dependent on having a favorable conversion rate. Naturally, a higher impression count and subscriber totals make you more likely to have high conversion rates and thus get you sponsors.
  • These sponsors do not need to take the form of an in-video overt advertisement but instead could be a paid segment or video, which the YouTuber only needs to flag that the video has “Sponsored Content” in it, but never needs to directly acknowledge this in the video itself.
• Videos appear on YouTube Kids simply because of a checkbox selected by the uploader within the video settings.
  • There is no additional curation or moderation being performed on YouTube Kids content other than hiding the comments on the videos.
  • YouTube Kids offloads the responsibility of curating and managing the content your child sees onto the parents as an opt-in option (I think you have to enable allow list mode, it’s not on by default).
• Demographic data shows that kids make up the majority of the watch time on the platform.
• YouTubers and Youtube in general are not legally beholden to the same standards as kid television programming for “broadcast” TV. Especially when it comes to advertising to children.
• You can access YouTube Shorts via the YouTube Kids app and since we can not scrutinize its underlying content delivery algorithm we have to assume it’s the same one used for normal YouTube shorts (but with a narrowed collection of videos), which due to the above we can only assume is tuned to the primary motivator of YouTube, which is long sessions of attention for maximum ad impressions.

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This whittles away at the type of content that works on YouTube kids, producing the best “results” for the “creators”, which, again is maximum watch time and impressions. The content is often actionable (Flush X down the toilet), materialistic (Look at my Lmabo!), repetitive, and highly formulaic. These videos often included advertising within them, either for a 3rd party (Blippy will visit a place in their videos as part of a paid promotion for that place, like an adventure park) or for a 1st party in the case of channels like “Ryan’s Toy World” which produces its own line of toys shown in the videos. It does not matter if these “ads” are disclosed via YouTube’s disclosure features because children will not understand what that even means. There is no moderation tool that prevents your child from seeing a video with sponsored content in it. It also promotes programmatic content, the substance of the video itself does not need to be of high quality, and because of the volume of content posted every day and the reactionary moderation system, you will get content that is intended to weird out, disturb or otherwise traumatize children.

To my knowledge, no formal study on how unfettered access to YouTube Kids impacts children has been conducted. From anecdotes I’ve heard 1st hand among other parents I know, YouTube Kids often promotes unrealistic relationships between the Parents and the Children in the videos, leading to unrealistic expectations of the parents from the child who is viewing. I’ve read plenty of 2nd hand accounts from Teachers in various online communities, where teachers express that they can tell which students have this unregulated access to online content. One example of this kind of account from a teacher expresses that they have children in their class who simply can not manage to sit and watch a feature-length film. We do know that online services like Instagram conduct these studies internally, and even conclude that their product is harmful to children, but ultimately do not take any action to correct this issue because it gets in the way of profits. We also know that these tech companies will not be held to account for their crimes, as evidenced by the hearing held in response to those leaked Instragam/Facebook documents. These platforms are of too much value not only to the capitalist class but also to their enforcement mechanisms in the way of surveillance.

In a world where your attention has a form of labor value, it’s not too hard to imagine how that might have profound negative impacts on individuals and communities at large.