Zwanziger Blog #7

Blog #7

            Whenever I see young children making YouTube videos it always makes me a little nervous for them. In general, I am an extremely paranoid person. I’m sure it doesn’t help that I have been stalked before and tend to watch videos of people tricking online predators into thinking they’re a young child, so they go and meet them only to be exposed for millions to watch online, but still. Children who post videos on the internet are being exposed to a lot of malicious things whether they realize it or not. In general, I have a very dystopian way of viewing social media, which Salter explains as the belief that “social media is inherently harmful or inevitably leads itself to misuse or abuse” (Salter). Essentially, I view social media as a gateway to bad things, especially when young children are involved, and I think that parents need to make sure that their children are safe and away from this. When I was a child I used to make videos with my friends and beg my parents to let me post them. My parents always said “no” and I never realized why, until I grew up and realized what a dark place the internet can actually be. Nonetheless I still watched a couple of videos that the channel “Kids’ Toys” posted. 

These videos were all really lighthearted, and involved a child reviewing a toy. Nothing wrong there. However, as I am a 21-year-old woman I felt weird watching these videos that are obviously posted towards children the same age. The young girl that appears in the video looks like she is around 8 years old and shows herself playing with toys that she is reviewing. While I can see why this definitely would interest a child of her same age, I was bored out of my mind. Not only that, but when I started to try and look at what the comments were that I realized that they were all disabled. Weird. I then clicked on a few more videos and realized that every one of the videos had the comments disabled. 

This channel has 2.56 million subscribers at the moment, yet all of the comments are turned off. This struck me as really odd, as most people who have this many subscribers often have their comment section open unless it’s a controversial video. This made me start to think that there must have been a reason in the past that made whoever runs the channel disable the comments. Another thing that I found was kind of weird was the subscriber to view ratio. This channel has over 2 million subscribers, so they should be getting a lot of views as well. This was not the case though. Most of the videos on the channel barely got 2,000 views, which is extremely weird. This could be that these kids bought the channel and it has gone downhill since then, or many of their subscribers are bots. The content on the channel was also extremely weird, and not typically the kind of channel that would have over 1 million subscribers. Because of all of this, I started to wonder who was really running the channel. Because of how the videos looked to be shot, it was clear the child was the one who was making the videos. However, there was not a lot of editing or anything that would indicate that she knows how to edit these videos are that they are professional in any nature. Most of the other toy review channels did not seem as “off” to me as this one did. For one, the other toy review channels that I saw from children around the same age seem to be more professionally produced, or often show their parents with them. This one was literally just a young girl recording herself playing with her toys. There was not a lot of review going on at all. I think that if it were more of a traditional “review” channel, and you could tell that a parent was involved then it would not seem that weird. In a weird way, this channel kind of reminded me of an ASMR videos. ASMR videos are another type of video on YouTube that creep me out a little, just because of how weird the videos can be. Some videos that people post will essentially be “role playing”, but them whispering. This is kind of what this video reminded me about, but instead of her pretending and actin something out she was really just carrying on with her real life. The entire time while I was watching this video I was extremely confused about a lot of things. For one, this girl in the video seemed extremely young. Like so young that I am unsure she would even know how to edit and even post videos herself on YouTube. It’s obvious that someone is helping her run the account, but the videos should not even be being posted in the first place just because I think it is opening the door to a lot of negativity or negative activity on the channel. As I said before, I am extremely paranoid about predators and stalkers to begin with, but this whole channel just put me on edge. In general, whenever I see a child have this many subscribers it rubs me the wrong way, as I sometimes believe that the parents are somewhat “pimping” their child out to make money for them. Having their children who do not know the full consequences of social media appear in videos regularly seems like they are subjecting them to a lot of danger. Again, while I can see how other children around her age would think that these videos were entertaining, there is the possibility that other people who are not children are watching these videos. When I was in high school I used to make YouTube videos out of pure boredom. While I was around the age of 17, I still got a lot of negative attention from older men, which obviously was extremely unnerving. Having children this young on the internet just seems to open a door to a lot of negative attention from predators. We have all heard the stories about how some predators pretend to be young children on social media to try and befriend other kids, and this is what this reminded me of. I think that if these videos were more professionally done or possibly managed a little bit better than it would not seem as creepy to me, but I still think that children this young should not be on the internet this much. I think that having young children be subjected to such a large audience opens doors for a lot of negativity and danger. Overall, I just think that this channel in particular is extremely creepy for some reason.