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12 Nov 18
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12 Oct 18
mfossattiSobre crianza de hijos y tecnología en la actualidad: https://t.co/hvUa2JrCto
Something is wrong on the internet – James Bridle – Medium -
18 Apr 18
Simon RileyI'm James Bridle. I'm a writer and artist concerned with technology and culture. I usually write on my own blog, but frankly I don't want what I'm talking about here anywhere near my own site. I've been aware for some time of the increasingly symbiotic relationship between younger children and YouTube. I see kids engrossed in screens all the time, in pushchairs and in restaurants, and there's always a bit of a Luddite twinge there, but I am not a parent, and I'm not making parental judgments for or on anyone else. I've seen family members and friend's children plugged into Peppa Pig and nursery rhyme videos, and it makes them happy and gives everyone a break, so OK.
But I don't even have kids and right now I just want to burn the whole thing down. Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level. Much of what I am going to describe next has been covered elsewhere, although none of the mainstream coverage I've seen has really grasped the implications of what seems to be occurring.To begin: Kid's YouTube is definitely and markedly weird. I've been aware of its weirdness for some time
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These videos, wherever they are made, however they come to be made, and whatever their conscious intention (i.e. to accumulate ad revenue) are feeding upon a system which was consciously intended to show videos to children for profit. The unconsciously-generated, emergent outcomes of that are all over the place. To expose children to this content is abuse. We're not talking about the debatable but undoubtedly real effects of film or videogame violence on teenagers, or the effects of pornography or extreme images on young minds, which were alluded to in my opening description of my own teenage internet use. Those are important debates, but they're not what is being discussed here. What we're talking about is very young children, effectively from birth, being deliberately targeted with content which will traumatise and disturb them, via networks which are extremely vulnerable to exactly this form of abuse. It's not about trolls, but about a kind of violence inherent in the combination of digital systems and capitalist incentives. It's down to that level of the metal.
This, I think, is my point: The system is complicit in the abuse. What concerns me is not just the violence being done to children here, although that concerns me deeply. What concerns me is that this is just one aspect of a kind of infrastructural violence being done to all of us, all of the time, and we're still struggling to find a way to even talk about it, to describe its mechanisms and its actions and its effects. As I said at the beginning of this essay: this is being done by people and by things and by a combination of things and people. Responsibility for its outcomes is impossible to assign but the damage is very, very real indeed. -
06 Apr 18
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I credit it as one of the most important influences on who I am today
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internet
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engrossed in screens
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Surprise Eggs videos
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On-demand video is catnip
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trusted source
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keyword/hashtag association
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created by bots and viewed by bots
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paired an unchecked list of verbs and pronouns with an online image generator.
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automation
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automated provenance
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similar videos
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knock-offs
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04 Apr 18
swollanAnnotations
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it was OK
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emancipatory
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I would want my kids to have the same opportunities to explore and grow and express themselves as I did
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choice
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Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level
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Surprise Egg craze
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continuous pattern of obscure branded lines
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one common video tactic is to assemble many nursery rhyme or cartoon episodes into hour+ compilations
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branded content is that it is a trusted source
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cognitive
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huge number of these videos are essentially created by bots and viewed by bots, and even commented on by bots. That is a whole strange world
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even if you’re a human, you have to end up impersonating the machine
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the same videos over and over again
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vast this system is
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stock photo libraries
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They literally had no idea what they were doing.
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the scale and logic of the system is complicit in these
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the rabbithole is so deep that it’s impossible to know how such a thing came into being
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BABYFUN TV only has 170 subscribers and very low view rates, but then there are thousands and thousands of channels like this
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impossible to know where the automation starts and ends
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These too seem to teem with violence
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They’re at play here, but they’re not the whole story
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they are
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a problem of moderation and legislatio
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added dose of right-wing technophobia and self-righteousness
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Who’s writing these scripts, editing these videos
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amplifying and enabling many of our latent desires
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I spend a lot of time arguing for this tendency, with regards to human sexual freedom, individual identity, and other issues
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ouTube algorithms necessitate exploitation in the same way that capitalism necessitates exploitation
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Not in a future of AI overlords and robots in the factories, but right here, now, on your screen, in your living room and in your pocket.
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BURIED ALIVE Outdoor Playground Finger Family Song Nursery Rhymes Animation Education Learning Video
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making money from 3D animation because the aesthetic standards are lower and independent production can profit through scale
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The system is complicit in the abuse
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What concerns me is that this is just one aspect of a kind of infrastructural violence being done to all of us, all of the time, and we’re still struggling to find a way to even talk about it, to describe its mechanisms and its actions and its effects
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this is being done by people and by things and by a combination of things and people
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18 Feb 18
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10 Feb 18
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02 Feb 18
Andreas KaltSomething is wrong on the internet – James Bridle – Medium
pinboard digitalisierung gesellschaft kritisches-denken reflexion semk-digitalisierung
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24 Jan 18
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03 Jan 18
Beverley HumphreyA very serious piece on the potential effects of @Youtube on our children. Very well worth a read.
https://t.co/CrfVT6A3d9 -
12 Dec 17
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29 Nov 17
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26 Nov 17
Mela EckenfelsFaszinierend, auch zum letzten RT, die Welt der (Klein-)Kindervideos auf YouTube. https://t.co/3Pn8YZAkYq
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23 Nov 17
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14 Nov 17
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13 Nov 17
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fraser smithI’m James Bridle. I’m a writer and artist concerned with technology and culture. I usually write on my own blog, but frankly I don’t want what I’m talking about here anywhere near my own site. Something is wrong on the internet – James Bridle – Medi…
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12 Nov 17
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09 Nov 17
Yvonne Barrett“Something is wrong on the internet” by @jamesbridle https://t.co/y3FF0eCiQ8 - disturbing but important to think about
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But as with Toy Freaks, what is concerning to me about the Peppa videos is how the obvious parodies and even the shadier knock-offs interact with the legions of algorithmic content producers until it is completely impossible to know what is going on.
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To expose children to this content is abuse. We’re not talking about the debatable but undoubtedly real effects of film or videogame violence on teenagers, or the effects of pornography or extreme images on young minds, which were alluded to in my opening description of my own teenage internet use. Those are important debates, but they’re not what is being discussed here. What we’re talking about is very young children, effectively from birth, being deliberately targeted with content which will traumatise and disturb them, via networks which are extremely vulnerable to exactly this form of abuse. It’s not about trolls, but about a kind of violence inherent in the combination of digital systems and capitalist incentives. It’s down to that level of the metal.
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What concerns me is that this is just one aspect of a kind of infrastructural violence being done to all of us, all of the time, and we’re still struggling to find a way to even talk about it, to describe its mechanisms and its actions and its effects. As I said at the beginning of this essay: this is being done by people and by things and by a combination of things and people. Responsibility for its outcomes is impossible to assign but the damage is very, very real indeed.
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08 Nov 17
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John Payne“Something is wrong on the internet” — @jamesbridle https://t.co/UoIYoc4e2T http://pic.twitter.com/Us2Ujnd7yS
— John Payne (@jeanphony) November 8, 2017 -
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A huge number of these videos are essentially created by bots and viewed by bots, and even commented on by bots. That is a whole strange world in and of itself.
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Other channels do away with the human actors to create infinite reconfigurable versions of the same videos over and over again. What is occurring here is clearly automated.
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the scale and logic of the system is complicit in these outputs, and requires us to think through their implications
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A step beyond the simply pirated Peppa Pig videos mentioned previously are the knock-offs. These too seem to teem with violence.
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In the official timeline, Peppa is appropriately reassured by a kindly dentist. In the version above, she is basically tortured, before turning into a series of Iron Man robots and performing the Learn Colours dance
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Disturbing Peppa Pig videos, which tend towards extreme violence and fear, with Peppa eating her father or drinking bleach, are, it turns out very widespread. They make up an entire YouTube subculture. Many are obviously parodies, or even satires of themselves, in the pretty common style of the internet’s outrageous, deliberately offensive kind. All the 4chan tropes are there, the trolls are out, we know this.
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YouTube Kids, an official app which claims to be kid-safe but is quite obviously not, is the problem identified, because it wrongly engenders trust in users.
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But both stories take at face value YouTube’s assertions that these results are incredibly rare and quickly removed: assertions utterly refuted by the proliferation of the stories themselves, and the growing number of social media posts, largely by concerned parents, from which they arise.
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horror and violence on display
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exploitation, not of children because they are children but of children because they are powerless
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missumami“Something is wrong on the internet” — @jamesbridle https://t.co/UREbBrRcoc https://t.co/3ijpzQEihW
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Jon SwindleOne of so-far hypothetical questions I ask myself frequently is how I would feel about my own children having the same kind of access to the internet today. And I find the question increasingly difficult to answer.
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Tim MansfieldSomething is wrong on the internet – James Bridle – Medium http://bit.ly/2haH00S
— Tim Mansfield (@timjmansfield) November 8, 2017 -
Jan Zuppinger"What concerns me is not just the violence being done to children here, although that concerns me deeply. What concerns me is that this is just one aspect of a kind of infrastructural violence being done to all of us, all of the time, and we’re still struggling to find a way to even talk about it, to describe its mechanisms and its actions and its effects. "
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Clare FenwickFascinating and chilling look into kids YouTube videos & the effect of algorithms on online culture. https://t.co/RWqTmuyti4
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Howard RheingoldRT @jackbacatweets: This article really shook me up. Def worth a read. “Something is wrong on the internet” by @jamesbridle https://t.co/e…
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07 Nov 17
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Wessel van Rensburgyoutube is probably the most undercovered and overlooked Bad Thing on the internet https://t.co/WYiG3Qurwb
The system is complicit in the abuse.
https://t.co/VaxkIqetro
A great companion to @zeynep’s amazing ted talk. By @jamesbridle -
Javier NeiraSomething is wrong on the internet: https://t.co/VduwHVjsC2 - an essay on YouTube, children's videos, automation, a… https://t.co/sr0lbgft8v
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Kassandra BoydSomething is wrong on the internet: https://t.co/VduwHVjsC2 - an essay on YouTube, children's videos, automation, a… https://t.co/sr0lbgft8v
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Dan ConnollySomething is wrong on the internet: https://t.co/VduwHVjsC2 - an essay on YouTube, children's videos, automation, a… https://t.co/sr0lbgft8v
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Matt Binderyoutube is probably the most undercovered and overlooked Bad Thing on the internet https://t.co/WYiG3Qurwb
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William GunnRT @VandekerckhoveJ: The grotesque horror in generated videos also shows a bit of what algorithms think of human morals and sensibilities
h… -
arne krokanStarted reading this on the walk to the train station & it plunked me right down on a bench. Engrossing & troubling. https://t.co/gRLNR05UNd
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Muzaffaruddin Alvivia All News on 'The Twitter Times: Muzaffar69/corpgov' http://bit.ly/1Sto0U9
#CorpGov All News on 'The Twitter Times: Muzaffar69_corpgov'
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rogerdclark22Something is wrong on the internet: https://t.co/VduwHVjsC2 - an essay on YouTube, children's videos, automation, abuse, and violence, which crystallises a lot of my current feelings about the internet through a particularly unpleasant example from …
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jose muriloIndustrialized nightmare production: read @jamesbridle on vast video farms optimized to traumatize kids on YouTube https://t.co/xGb23KaQc0
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Nils Müller“Something is wrong on the internet” by @jamesbridle https://t.co/rOGBLi9T2P
— Michael Schneiberg (@MSchneiberg) November 7, 2017 -
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I no longer have any idea what’s going on here and I really don’t want to and I’m starting to think that that is kind of the point. That’s part of why I’m starting to think about the deliberateness of this all. There is a lot of effort going into making these.
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most of the time it seems deeper, and more unconscious than that. The internet has a way of amplifying and enabling many of our latent desires; in fact, it’s what it seems to do best.
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Automated reward systems like YouTube algorithms necessitate exploitation in the same way that capitalism necessitates exploitation, and if you’re someone who bristles at the second half of that equation then maybe this should be what convinces you of its truth. Exploitation is encoded into the systems we are building, making it harder to see, harder to think and explain, harder to counter and defend against. Not in a future of AI overlords and robots in the factories, but right here, now, on your screen, in your living room and in your pocket.
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There are humans in the loop here, even if only on the production side, and I’m pretty worried about them too.
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This video, BURIED ALIVE Outdoor Playground Finger Family Song Nursery Rhymes Animation Education Learning Video, contains all of the elements we’ve covered above, and takes them to another level. Familiar characters, nursery tropes, keyword salad, full automation, violence, and the very stuff of kids’ worst dreams. And of course there are vast, vast numbers of these videos. Channel after channel after channel of similar content, churned out at the rate of hundreds of new videos every week. Industrialised nightmare production.
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There is more violent and more sexual content like this available. I’m not going to link to it. I don’t believe in traumatising other people, but it’s necessary to keep stressing it, and not dismiss the psychological effect on children of things which aren’t overtly disturbing to adults, just incredibly dark and weird.
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We’re not talking about the debatable but undoubtedly real effects of film or videogame violence on teenagers, or the effects of pornography or extreme images on young minds,
-
Those are important debates, but they’re not what is being discussed here.
-
What we’re talking about is very young children, effectively from birth, being deliberately targeted with content which will traumatise and disturb them, via networks which are extremely vulnerable to exactly this form of abuse. It’s not about trolls, but about a kind of violence inherent in the combination of digital systems and capitalist incentives.
-
The system is complicit in the abuse.
-
This is a deeply dark time, in which the structures we have built to sustain ourselves are being used against us — all of us — in systematic and automated ways.
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What concerns me is that this is just one aspect of a kind of infrastructural violence being done to all of us, all of the time, and we’re still struggling to find a way to even talk about it, to describe its mechanisms and its actions and its effects.
-
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Bryan JacksonWhat concerns me is not just the violence being done to children here, although that concerns me deeply. What concerns me is that this is just one aspect of a kind of infrastructural violence being done to all of us, all of the time, and we’re still struggling to find a way to even talk about it, to describe its mechanisms and its actions and its effects. As I said at the beginning of this essay: this is being done by people and by things and by a combination of things and people. Responsibility for its outcomes is impossible to assign but the damage is very, very real indeed.
culture internet technology video children youth education violence essay youtube
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Francois GuiteWhat concerns me is that this is just one aspect of a kind of infrastructural violence being done to all of us, all of the time, and we’re still struggling to find a way to even talk about it, to describe its mechanisms and its actions and its effects.
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Ryan JohnsonI’m James Bridle. I’m a writer and artist concerned with technology and culture. I usually write on my own blog, but frankly I don’t want what I’m talking about here anywhere near my own site. via Pocket
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educationfairbdI’m James Bridle. I’m a writer and artist concerned with technology and culture. I usually write on my own blog, but frankly I don’t want what I’m talking about here anywhere near my own site. via Pocket
IFTTT Pocket and it forces me to quest at every level. automatically scal something is wrong on the traumatise abuse chil
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Jordan GoldmanI’m James Bridle. I’m a writer and artist concerned with technology and culture. I usually write on my own blog, but frankly I don’t want what I’m talking about here anywhere near my own site.
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Md. Nazrul IslamI’m James Bridle. I’m a writer and artist concerned with technology and culture. I usually write on my own blog, but frankly I don’t want what I’m talking about here anywhere near my own site. via Pocket
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Hapax LegomenaA huge number of these videos are essentially created by bots and viewed by bots, and even commented on by bots. That is a whole strange world in and of itself. But it shouldn’t obscure that there are also many actual children, plugged into iphones and tablets, watching these over and over again — in part accounting for the inflated view numbers — learning to type basic search terms into the browser, or simply mashing the sidebar to bring up another video.
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06 Nov 17
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Oliver QuinlanFascinating and chilling look into kids YouTube videos & the effect of algorithms on online culture. https://t.co/RWqTmuyti4
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julius beezerA step beyond the simply pirated Peppa Pig videos mentioned previously are the knock-offs. These too seem to teem with violence. In the official Peppa Pig videos, Peppa does indeed go to the dentist, and the episode in which she does so seems to be …
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Beto BorbollaRT @jamesbridle: Something is wrong on the internet: https://t.co/VduwHVjsC2 - an essay on YouTube, children's videos, automation, a…
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