Child and consumer advocacy groups are unhappy with Google's new YouTube Kids app, which launched in February of this year. They say the app contains videos like a Sesame Street episode “dubbed with long strings of expletives,” references to pedophilia in a My Little Pony review, and a Budweiser commercial.
Other videos are less insidious—how-tos on using circular saws, ASMR videos showing a woman lighting matches, and TED talks for more mature audiences—but given that the YouTube Kids app description says that it's “Made for Ages 5 and Under,” the videos are out of place on the app, the group says.
On Tuesday, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) and the Center for Digital Democracy sent a letter and a video to the Federal Trade Commission, documenting a search that the groups did in the YouTube Kids app on May 5. The letter is a follow-up to an FTC complaint that the CCFC filed back in April alleging that the YouTube Kids app mixes branded channels from companies like McDonald's, Mattel, and Fisher-Price too freely with real children's programming. The app's features “take advantage of children’s developmental vulnerabilities and violate long-standing media and advertising safeguards that protect children viewing television,” the CCFC wrote in April.
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