Protecting Children From Graphic Violence on the Internet
Many of us are aware of the horrors of Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, a viral video which took the Internet by storm in 2011. The terrifying short features a cast of loveable characters in a setting like that of a children’s show. The video quickly takes a dark turn; the viewer is shown upsetting images containing gratuitous gore and macabre themes. The video is entertaining for what it is—a quirky dose of amusing shock value. However, the trend of disturbing videos assuming the façade of kids’ entertainment has seen a recent and troubling resurgence. Journalist Laura June detailed how her three-year-old child was inadvertently exposed to one of these videos. In the seemingly innocuous video, "Peppa [the pig] does a lot of screaming and crying and the dentist is just a bit sadistic and it's just way, way off what a three-year-old should watch." The gory details of the video won’t be included here, but one can probably conjure up a sufficient mental image.
Videos like this one can be funny. I remember how mortified I was as my friend first showed me Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared. The confusion and disgust quickly turned to amusement at the twisted concept. Dark humor certainly has its place, but I find myself troubled by how easy it is for children to stumble across these videos. One channel, “Toys and Funny Kids Surprise Eggs”, is one of the top 100 most watched YouTube accounts in the world, and its videos have over five billion combined views. Much of the content is not age restricted, and BBC has received multiple stories from concerned parents lamenting the potential psychological damage inflicted on their kids. To make matters worse, the videos often feature beloved children’s characters, including Thomas the Tank Engine, the cast of Frozen and many more. The emotional scarring a child can experience from watching their favorite cartoon characters be murdered is inexcusable.
YouTube needs to do more to keep kids from being exposed to this dark corner of their website. Channels repeatedly reported to be uploading this type of content should be age restricted—but it shouldn’t stop there. This type of content should also act as a teaching opportunity for parents to educate their children on online safety and avoiding explicit content. In my opinion, young children (such as the aforementioned Laura June’s three-year-old) should not be allowed unrestricted access to the Internet, what with the wide variety of distasteful content available. Through restriction of content, education and supervision, parents can at the very least minimize the risk of exposure to these videos. Content creators should also accept some of the responsibility in this regard. It would be a simple measure on their part to denote their videos with a warning message in the title or description for mature content, or simply to flag the videos as age restricted themselves. While this would most likely constitute a blow to their advertising revenue, the producers should put the needs of the community first.
Violence—however animated and cartoonish it might be—should not be a regular theme in children’s entertainment. The recent increase in the popularity of these videos has been a cause for alarm for parents, and rightly so. YouTube, content creators, and parents all must play a part in keeping their children safe online. Videos such as, "BLOODY ELSA: Frozen Elsa's Arm is Broken by Spiderman", serve only to normalize graphic violence for children, while also shattering their wholesome images of their favorite characters. I don’t think this trend is necessarily sick or disgusting—it’s just dark, low level humor. But more needs to be done to regulate it.