More than one year ago, YouTube had pledged that they were going to crackdown on the many disturbing videos that have been found on their platform that are targeted toward children.

From new age restrictions to removing hundreds of questionable videos, they have been trying to clean up a problem that many have brought to their attention over the years. That problem is a growing issue with the number of disturbing videos aimed at children that can be found on the site.

These videos provide dark and disturbing children's content that many children are consuming without the appropriate parental oversight.

You can find videos containing scenes of torture, to cannibalism, or masturbation etc. Many of the videos also make use of popular entertainment characters to do it; making it more difficult for a child to distinguish the quality of the source.

Mental health experts have warned that these often fear-inducing videos have the potential to greatly impact and damage the development of a child.

The recommendation algorithm that YouTube uses might have originally contributed to the rise of the problem in the first place, but now researchers say that they've come up with an algorithm to help. They've created a high accuracy deep learning-based classifier that's designed to detect the unwanted content on the site. They were able to do this by analyzing the faults with the current algorithm that's being used.

After looking at more than 133k videos online, researchers identified at least 8.6 percent to be inappropriate.

They believe their new approach to be at least 82 percent effective in getting the job done. There still is a decent chance however that a child today could stumble onto an inappropriate video that hasn't been identified yet though.

Health experts have urged parents to use caution when allowing their young children to access these devices. Some have even suggested that you keep your young children away from YouTube altogether.

Researchers concluded that there likely wouldn't be an organic end to this problem that they see as being fueled by a mixture of the algorithmic content creation and the monetization opportunities.

YouTube continues to remove many videos but there's always more to be found.

pic 1 -Daily Dot
pic 2 -The Coverage
pic 3- Medium

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