From Unboxing To Mutilation

If you have ever jumped into the abyss of the YouTube children's video rabbit hole you may
have seen some unboxing videos, lullabies, Adolf Hitler dancing, Donald Trump counting his fingers,
pregnant Disney characters being cut open by comic book characters, and scat play. Moreover, these
aren't all the strange themes playing out in these animated and live action videos catching the attention
of children waywardly watching phones, tablets, and laptops and the view counts are staggering.
Videos of Disney's popular cash cow Elsa being groped, spanked, defecated on, and worse (yes, worse)
boast millions of views within a week and sometimes, even as short as a day. Now that I have
generated enough hype about this disturbing video content, let's dig a bit deeper. Nietzsche once said
“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how” and the why is a lot more telling and disturbing
than the how.

Bots & Blueprints

A couple of years ago, there was a creepy YouTube channel called Hey Kids! that featured
benign (albeit vaguely unsettling) nursery rhymes featuring Disney characters, Shrek, and other
licensed characters dancing placidly in cheaply made computer animation with shrill and badly tuned
singing. Here is the description from the old channel: “ Since parenting is not a 9-5 job, Hey Kids
service is available for you and your child 24 hours a day. Hey Kids features short programmes
interlude by clips of favorite Children’s Songs and Finger Families. The schedule is active, engaging
and fun, and geared to promote interaction. Hey Kids broadcasts soft music and gently moving visuals
designed to help soothe waking babies and create a calm atmosphere in the home. The program
featured on Hey Kids are part of our rich and diverse library dedicated for babies and toddlers. Hey
Kids library features many original series that have been created by our dedicated team and which
address the entire spectrum of early learning skills and development milestones that babies and
toddlers encounter in their first years.”However, the videos became increasingly weirder when Donald
Trump and Star Wars' Darth Maul started to grace the computer screen. The videos started to gradually
take a darker tone featuring a scarred Humpty Dumpty face template with the eyes and mouth cut out
and filled in with an Indian man (presumably the channel owner) who started to speak in soliloquy to
the children watching the channel, saying things like “does your mother beat you?” and “do you have
your sports shoes on?”. He started to claim he was an AI and spoke of an upcoming “hybrid human”
that would meld with AI. Later, his face was replaced with Hitler and Darth Maul saying the same
strange things to the assumed children watching. This eventually got the attention of adult viewers who
dissected his intentions through Reddit and the myriad of chans until his identity was essentially
revealed as Abhishek Dhariwal and YouTube deleted his channels... hardly an AI. Why did he do this?
Was he a troll? I can't be sure, but his viewer count and subscriptions were huge and the revenue
must've been pretty substantial. Perhaps it was an art experiment or a commentary on the conspiracy
side of the internet. The Hey Kids! channel was bandied about all over the paranormal and conspiracy
chans with all kinds of theories from an actual AI to an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) and the content
did seem to get weirder once more attention was tuned into it. The example of Hey Kids! is just one of
many that have either eclipsed the strangeness or are shadowed by this eponymous channel.
However, moving on to the latest trend of children's videos commonly featuring Elsa and Spideman
performing strange shenanigans, the monetary opportunities still abound.
 Enter Elsa, Stage Right

The channel DisneyCarToys seems to be where this thematic trend began, displaying a new
blueprint for catching the attention of kids that have been given a device to silence their inquisitive
minds and give parents a break from their exhausting parental duties. The channel is pretty benign and
features a family playing with their kids in different settings with costumes or outings to family
friendly parks and outlets. Nothing too crazy is on this channel, but as stated earlier; the blueprint was
demonstrated to future channels and a demographic ripe for exploitation was presented.
quickly, many channels started to pop up featuring animated and live action skits featuring famous
characters doing silly and sometimes sinister things. One of them was investigated by the prolific and
hugely popular content creator H3H3 Productions and it was revealed to be owned by notorious prank
content creators Ethan and Moe Bradberry who expanded their YouTube empire into Elsa and
Spiderman videos. This should show how lucrative this trend has become to content creators.
If you go searching around YouTube for these channels, you'll find a complex incestuous network of
channels that sometimes are owned by the same content creators and will use each channel as a
platform to promote views by organic or (usually) through bots to pump up numbers. Even the
comment section is inundated with gibberish comments that either look like a crash landing on a
keyboard (e.g., gsjhyfsjdgfjoug) or keywords awkwardly placed in sentence structures by an analytic
bot. Most channel owners claim that this is due to kids accidentally hitting the keypad on devices while
watching. However, genuinely benign kids channels lack such strange comments on their videos. This
isn't as bad as when children actually do comment on some of them as demonstrated on another
channel that attracts a lot of kid attention named (name recently changed) SuperHero Movies IRL. On
this channel, the owner requests pictures from young people on the comment section that are innocently
giving adulation to their beloved childish icons. So why the strange imagery? Maybe it's way to get
attention from undeveloped minds with the loudest and most crude themes. Maybe it's a mixture of
attention grabbing for some and grooming for others. There is a sea of these videos and standing out is
starting to be a bit difficult now...who knows. At this point in time, these videos have cluttered up
YouTube and are virtually unavoidable for children...which brings me to some major points outside of
content creators exploiting kids for a paycheck: poor parental habits are creating a broken window for
wolves to enter into and prey on children.

Wolves At Your Child's Cerebral Door

Not all creators are nefarious vampires out for your kid's blood, some are just homebound
parents looking for a business venture that doesn't require a huge overhead. The opportunities are there
now to create content for kids due to the opportunity created by their absentee parent's lack of attention
or knowledge of filters. However, they are still preying on a weakness from the home. These wolves
aren't just greedy content creators and would be pedophiles ( even though that's worse enough), the
problem is larger than that and the problem starts with parents. Parents are giving their children devices
for long and unsupervised amounts of time and have created a market for their attention. From toy
manufacturers to content creators, kids attention has been big business for many decades. However, this
has now become a precise science now and much different than the sugary cereal peddlers of the 80s
from Saturday Morning cartoons. This should raise a slight alarm for parents with small children, but
looking at the videos out there; one can only assume that it falls on deaf and inept parental ears. Have
parents become engrossed in their own electronic bubble that they are not only ignorant of their
offspring's content, they simply don't care? Either way, children are getting preyed upon for either
monetary gain or nefarious intentions and this indifference is a clear invite for predators. This broken
window has to be fixed at home and if it isn't, then parents are sending a clear message to the would be
wolves at their door: your children are up for grabs. Which teeth do you want sunk into your child's
jugular? The ones that want to groom them for future consumer behavior or much much worse?