YouTube has decided that if an ad on the YouTube Kids app isn’t paid for, then it will not regulate the content. That means corporations can create and upload videos marketing products directly to children. This opens the door to harmful products, like junk food, being marketed to children even younger than five. It also flies in the face of FCC advertising regulations, adhered to for decades by cable, satellite and network TV, that put time limits on children’s programming advertisements and does not allow for “host selling” – i.e. when the host of a program is actually selling a product.
I still remember the time I sat down with my three-year-old son to watch “The Wheels on the Bus” on the main YouTube website only to have the video unexpectedly break to an advertisement featuring a “cop” firing multiple bullets into a "bad guy" doubling over in agony. To my son, these weren’t actors in a TV show these were real people and real guns. I thought the YouTube Kids app would put an end to my children viewing harmful, inappropriate advertisements. But what we have now is something even more insidious. Our kids are being used as commercial targets and commodities.
The bottom line is this: YouTube Kids is exposing children to the very things that it purports to protect them from. If YouTube is not willing to regulate its app content, then government needs to. Tell the FTC to stop YouTube from exposing children to harmful, insidious online advertising that wouldn’t be allowed on TV.
