YouTube may have done a lot of work to keep offending videos off of from its Kids app, but there’s still more work to do. Business Insider discovered that the Kids app was suggesting conspiracy theory videos when users searched for certain keywords. For instance, if you looked for “UFO,” you would find videos from David Icke talking about several discredited conspiracy theories, which includes the theory that the planet is run by reptile-human hybrids.
After Business Insider contacted YouTube, the video was removed, and quickly acknowledged the difficult of keeping the Kids app completely clean. YouTube says that their team screens content using “human trained systems,” per the statement, but “sometimes we miss the mark.”
While YouTube has continued to keep questionable content off its platform, child-oriented apps tend to face a much higher level of scrutiny because children are not supposed to see false material, contextual help or otherwise any questionable material. Perhaps you can sympathize with YouTube a little bit in a sense that it’s hard to completely remove questionable content when hundreds of videos that are uploaded every minute. Until (or if) YouTube can offer a better filtering system, these kinds of incidents will likely continue to occur.
