Enter Horrific World Of YouTube Car Content For Kids

Screenshot: YouTube

If you’ve got kids, they’ve likely been exposed to YouTube via grandma’s iPad more than once. If they like cars, the algorithm is very likely serving them some weird, bootleg car content that gives me the absolute creeps to watch.

Keeping an eye on kids and providing them with enriching, meaningful experiences is a lot of work, especially if you’re working a job or two. It’s not really for me to blame people for how they make it work. My parents sat me in front of a TV/Nintendo for a large portion of my childhood and I’d say I’m roughly fine. Still, this stuff, which is just everywhere on YouTube is shocking. Even the worst, most half-assed Netflix kids slop has someone looking at it and deciding whether or not it can be hosted on Netflix. It’s a low bar, but one YouTube can’t clear.

This sort of stuff isn’t limited to cars, there are all kinds of grown adults making little videos of them playing with Cars toys, or making shitty bootleg Cars cartoons. Worse than that, there are what I assume are parents pointing cameras at their children and making them act out weird little scenarios—in the best case, turning their play time into a way for the parents to potentially make money. The kids are performing and in other areas of entertainment there would be rules around that.

Again, not really my business but I’d say that YouTube, in creating a market for this stuff and distributing it indiscriminately to kids, without any apparent concern for its provenance or quality, is enabling a kind of large scale child neglect.

If you click through this, you’ll find that not only are these videos racking up millions of views, the channels that make them have millions of subscribers. So it’s not just the algorithm, someone is making an affirmative choice here. I wouldn’t typically offer parenting advice, but in general I don’t let my kids watch YouTube except under close supervision.

Anyway, look at these weird videos I found: