2017·The platform era
Elsagate
An enormous machine-made genre aimed at small children that nobody had commissioned and nobody was watching over.
A trend people joined in with
- SourceNo single original
- MediaNot held by ViralWorld
What this was
Thousands of videos, tagged as child-friendly and surfacing in YouTube Kids, in which characters from Frozen, Spider-Man and Peppa Pig appear in scenarios ranging from the merely bizarre to the violent, scatological and sexual. Many were made by anonymous accounts, in bulk, with keyword-stuffed titles designed to satisfy an algorithm rather than a viewer, and they carried automatically placed advertising.
It first appeared in 2017, during the platform era.
It is the clearest demonstration that recommendation systems optimising for watch time will manufacture their own supply. Nobody set out to make this; it was produced because the incentive existed, at a scale no human moderation could inspect, and it was being served to preschoolers. Public awareness built through 2016 and 2017 as the Guardian, the Verge and others documented it.
YouTube tightened its child-safety rules substantially, demonetised and removed large numbers of channels, and eventually faced regulatory action over children's data. The underlying problem — automated content produced for automated distribution — did not go away, and recurs with every new format.
More from 2017
- Dancing Pallbearers 2017The platform era
- Lofi Girl 2017The platform era
- Man's Not Hot 2017The platform era
- The La La Land Oscars mix-up 2017The platform era
- It's Everyday Bro 2017The platform era
- r/place 2017The platform era
- Covfefe 2017The platform era
- Trash Doves 2017The platform era
- Fyre Festival 2017The platform era
- Despacito 2017The platform era
The platform era
- Instagram egg 2019The platform era
- Dab dance 2015The platform era
- Storm Area 51 2019The platform era
- Renegade dance 2019The platform era
- The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet 2019The platform era
- The Backrooms 2019The platform era
- Kiki Challenge 2018The platform era
- Crab Rave 2018The platform era
Related
Nothing related yet. Relationships are recorded where evidence supports them, not inferred from similarity.
Behind the recordWhere it came from
There is no original to identify: this spread through many separate posts at once rather than from a first one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it spread and what people called it is the record.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first version of this, because research established there was not one — it appeared in many places at once.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
- What happens
- Thousands of videos, tagged as child-friendly and surfacing in YouTube Kids, in which characters from Frozen, Spider-Man and Peppa Pig appear in scenarios ranging from the merely bizarre to the violent, scatological and sexual. Many were made by anonymous accounts, in bulk, with keyword-stuffed titles designed to satisfy an algorithm rather than a viewer, and they carried automatically placed advertising.