Abstract: The use of a wide variety of children’s media as a conduit for nefarious entities to fulfil their sinister goals through platforms like YouTube and YouTube Kids is a contentious subject, which has often been at the crux of discussions surrounding the safety of children online. However, although YouTube has set child safety policies in place, and developed content filtering systems to aid in the removal of harmful content from the platform, a vast majority of it passes undetected. Additionally, when subversive content on the aforementioned platforms is propagated in regional languages, it eludes the content filtering systems in place. Ultimately, the imbroglio of children’s safety online evinces the question: Is a child who consumes content in vernacular languages on the platforms YouTube and YouTube Kids privy to a safe browsing experience, particularly when using the platforms unsupervised? This study thus aims to assess the implications of allowing children to access content on YouTube and YouTube Kids in relation to four different hypothetical contexts and two regional Indian languages, namely Hindi and Malayalam.
The YouTube Rabbit Hole Paper by Citizen Digital Foundation is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
