On YouTube Friday morning, several hundred viewers watched a live, animated video of a female Minecraft avatar with bare breasts opening a present full of the poop emoji. In the video’s thumbnail, two inflated breasts held up a poop Minecraft brick.
It’s one of several disturbing and grotesque animated Minecraft videos identified by WIRED featured under YouTube’s Minecraft “Topic” page, a content-sorting feature introduced in 2019. Similar Minecraft-style thumbnails found there include an avatar with heart eyes and a bloody knife smiling at a chained-up woman in a bikini, a mother and father holding sticks up to a crying toddler, and a woman pregnant with feces about to sit on a man. The live videos loop for hours on end, some racking up tens of thousands of total views. Some of these channels receive tens of thousands of views a day.
In 2017, journalists discovered hundreds of graphically sexual or violent YouTube videos masquerading as “child-friendly”—later referred to as Elsagate—on the platform’s supposedly age-appropriate YouTube Kids app. These videos, which depicted child abuse, murder, and other R-rated content, often featured popular childrens’ TV characters like Peppa Pig or Frozen’s Elsa or hid under innocuous titles, which apparently helped them fly under the radar of YouTube’s algorithms. They were also created by independent animators. In response, YouTube deleted over 150,000 videos and removed ads on two million.
YouTube’s Elsagate purge challenged some of the obvious ways unscrupulous content creator ..
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