>>3503925You know that whole thing about "kids these days, they don't wanna play outside, they just wanna watch their tick-tocks and their instant grams and their facebooks" that you see old people go on about?
Well that shit isn't always true, but it is true for kids raised in shitty homes where parents don't actively participate in their child's life anymore, typically because they spend all day working and only spend a small chunk of time with the kid, and maybe they hire a babysitter to make sure the kid doesn't kill themselves.
So what does the kid do all day? Well, most households have iPads, or iPhones, or any kind of smart device, and wouldn't you know it, children have two things that hold universally true.
>1: they all like bright colors and trendy kid games>2: they do not have the coherent mind required to make an account, or more importantly, to turn off the "auto-play" functionThis is where the real algorithmic shit with Youtube comes into full bear. There are millions, MILLIONS of children in the world, not just America or Europe but all over the planet, who are simply given access to the internet, unsupervised, and will play videos with the bright shiny colors and the Minecraft blocks and the fortnite songs, and the algorithm will cycle them through the most algo-pleasing videos via auto-play, generating millions and millions of free clicks, and of course these children don't know what ad-blocking is, so they get hit with those full force.
Enough to drive someone to conniptions, if you really stop and stew on the ethical consequences of this all. The only solution I can think of is banning children from the internet, or at least restricting them to shit like Club Penguin, but such a wonderful idea would take far too much oversight, and likely hardly work at all, while parents would have no understanding of how to do this in the first place, because we still have a good ten to twenty years before a generation of parents that actually understand the internet intrinsically are widespread.
