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February 26, 2022 03:30 am

YouTube's Captions Insert Explicit Language In Kids' Videos

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A new study (PDF) of YouTube's algorithmic captions on videos aimed at kids documents how the text sometimes veers into very adult language. In a sample of more than 7,000 videos from 24 top-ranked kids' channels, 40 percent displayed words in their captions found on a list of 1,300 "taboo" terms, drawn in part from a study on cursing. In about 1 percent of videos, the captions included words from a list of 16 "highly inappropriate" terms, with YouTube's algorithms most likely to add the words "bitch," "bastard," or "penis." Some videos posted on Ryan's World, a top kids' channel with more than 30 million subscribers, illustrate the problem. In one, the phrase "You should also buy corn" is rendered in captions as "you should also buy porn." In other videos, a "beach towel" is transcribed as a "bitch towel," "buster" becomes "bastard," a "crab" becomes a "crap," and a craft video on making a monster-themed dollhouse features a "bed for penis." Automated captions are not available on YouTube Kids, the version of the service aimed at children. But many families use the standard version of YouTube, where they can be seen. Pew Research Center reported in 2020 that 80 percent of parents to children 11 or younger said their child watched YouTube content; more than 50 percent of children did so daily. [...] YouTube spokesperson Jessica Gibby says children under 13 are recommended to use YouTube Kids, where automated captions cannot be seen. On the standard version of YouTube, she says the feature improves accessibility. "We are continually working to improve automatic captions and reduce errors," she says. "The team also ran audio from kids' YouTube videos through an automated transcription service offered by Amazon," adds Wired. "It too sometimes made mistakes that made the content edgier. [...] 'Fluffy' became the F-word in the transcript of a video about a toy; one video host asked viewers to send in not 'craft ideas' but 'crap ideas.'"

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