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.. yet 3 years in, I can *still* find ElsaGate Videos without even trying. You know, the ones that are "just weird" on the surface yet undeniably part of a larger phenomenon Google never lifted a finger to help shed light on, just deleting the outright violent ones and calling it a day, declaring victory together with Disney as early as December 2017?
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=learn+colors+transformation
Fuck YouTube with a rusty chainsaw, in hell, forever. Verily, I'd have to look up Croatian cussing to adequately express my disgust whenever YouTube acts like they have a shred of morality, responsibility or spine.
So YouTube is banning and deleting again..
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stargirl
I'm a preschool teacher and find this phenomenon deeply disturbing. I can actually tell from their behavior which of my students spend a lot of time on their iPads, and I worry about the effect that malicious technology is going to have on their brain development.
I also wonder to what extent the body horror videos can be interpreted as a type of grooming.
When I heard of the phenomenon in November 2017, I fell into a kind of rabbit hole that broke my heart in a way I can't even articulate. I made a sort of crawling suite to find ElsaGate channels from existing ones, collect the descriptions and titles of channels, made something to tag the thumbnails with, so I could, say, display all thumbnails containing theme or object x, y and z. I saw no other way to make heads or tail of it, considering the volume of channels and videos.
But I just couldn't stand it anymore after a while. And it took me a few more months of not looking at anything of it to not think of or be reminded of it every single day. It was a truly shitty time. I felt responsible to "not look away", but after a while I had to. I'll never tire of showing the original article around, encouraging others to read the Wikipedia article, etc.. but actually documenting the whole sordid mess? I tried, the bottleneck was my psyche, and I doubt most people would want to look at it for long either. It's just too much, and too sick.
It's similar with bringing it up in casual conversation.. I can explain it, but to really explain the depths of it I would have to go on for hours and hours, and it would just make people (and myself) feel uncomfortable without any way for them to make me feel better. And I'm not even a victim, much less a toddler who soaked such things up! It absolutely boggles my mind.
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Nein MC
And hey, instead of talking about how these videos are just "weird", let's talk about how YouTube is a private plattform that doesn't even *need* a reason to delete stuff... and these things being "weird", the authors having no convincing explanations for making them, and it all being connected [1] with really fucked up and sadistic stuff, could be reason enough. It's not like removing videos for a target audience that can't even speak yet would lead to any sort of backlash. Parent's wouldn't miss this trash, either.
[1] and usually interlinked: I found hundreds of EG-channels (and hundreds of thousands of videos) in weeks in early 2018 just by scraping thumbnails from "featured channels", and following that chain (because all you really need is thumbs and video titles of a channel on one one page to decide what is what), until Google blocked the key I was using for that (go figure). They just SIT on all that data (which is probably orders of magnitude more than that was available publically at that point). All they said to parents was "we have it under control now, go back to sleep". Shame on them and the countless people who excused them for it.