As many of you have probably noticed if you follow the Youtube drama pipeline at all, a huge movement has started up to spotlight a disturbing trend in video creation happening over there. A swarm of "for kids" style channels have appeared, pumping out the lowest quality short animations possible to pander to kids randomly searching for their favorite TV and video game idols. The titles are all specifically formatted to directly target them, usually just dropping a string of keywords.
If it stopped at that, it wouldn't be too bad. Plenty of companies over the years have released garbage programming kids love to flock to. This takes it to the next level though, using explicit thumbnails and sexualized, fetishy plotlines to lure them in. They range anywhere from pregnancy, to gore and groping. This stuff is absolutely everywhere with an armada of channels cloning, copying, reuploading, and pumping out nonsense at a near constant rate. Equestria Girls has been a big market for these guys, especially Flash Sentry and Twilight Sparkle.
People over on Reddit have collected screencaps, but the thumbnails alone are bad enough. A few examples and more can be found below!
Some of the thumbnails, literally marketed toward kids:
And an entire collage of nastyness I don't even want to ember here. Find that here.
At the moment there are campaigns to hopefully fight this, as it's pretty blatant that they are just mining ad dollars off kids that watch videos 100 times without really knowing the context. Many speculate that Youtube isn't interested in going after it, as these kids re-watching videos generate a boatload of revenue. They are cracking down on certain aspects of it, but for the most part it's still running completely rampant.
Some even speculate that these are bring created by an automated program that a single company has developed, as a large amount of these channels have some sort of tie to one another. Many have Chinese characters in the titles.
Overall, it's a mess. Hopefully more spotlight and reporting of this helps kick Youtube into gear. Pretty much every major Youtuber has already dropped a video on the topic.
