Protecting our Children from the Dark Corners of YouTube: A Cutting-Edge Analysis

Kids of all ages are among the hundreds of thousands who regularly consume gigabytes of content on platforms such as YouTube. Of late, YouTube has seen an explosion in the number of channels catering to child-centric content. Many of these channels focus on popular culture for kids, such as cartoons, comic books, and superhero movies. Sadly, many of these videos are unsettling, violent, or sexual in nature, making them unsuitable for their intended audience. Platforms such as YouTube are being used by malicious users to transmit disturbing visual content, such as adult-oriented content disguised as children’s cartoons. It is thus becoming increasingly clear that social media networks must implement a system for automatically filtering the inappropriate material that makes its way onto these sites. This study provides a survey of the various methodologies that have been employed by researchers in the recent years to achieve promising results in filtering out the child unsafe content on YouTube.