Free Hess, a pediatrician and mother, had learned about the chilling videos over the summer when another mom spotted one on YouTube Kids. She said that minutes into the clip from a children’s video game, a man appeared on the screen — offering instructions on how to commit suicide.
“I was shocked,” Hess said, noting that since then, the scene has been spliced into several more videos from the popular Nintendo game Splatoon on YouTube and YouTube Kids, a video app for children. Hess, from Ocala, Fla., has been blogging about the altered videos and working to get them taken down amid an outcry from parents and child health experts, who say such visuals can be damaging to children.
One on YouTube shows a man pop into the frame. “Remember, kids,” he begins, holding what appears to be an imaginary blade to the inside of his arm. “Sideways for attention. Longways for results.”
“I think it’s extremely dangerous for our kids,” Hess said about the clips Sunday in a phone interview with The Washington Post. “I think our kids are facing a whole new world with social media and Internet access. It’s changing the way they’re growing, and it’s changing the way they’re developing. I think videos like this put them at risk.”
A recent YouTube video viewed by The Post appears to include a spliced-in scene showing Internet personality Filthy Frank. It’s unclear why he was edited into these clips, but his fans have been known to put him in memes and other videos. There is a similar video on his channel filmed in front of a green screen, but the origins and context of the clip in question are not clear.
Andrea Faville, a spokeswoman for YouTube, said in a written statement that the company works to ensure that it is “not used to encourage dangerous behavior and we have strict policies that prohibit videos which promote self-harm.”
“We rely on both user flagging and smart detection technology to flag this content for our reviewers,” Faville added. “Every quarter we remove millions of videos and channels that violate our policies and we remove the majority of these videos before they have any views. We are always working to improve our systems and to remove violative content more quickly, which is why we report our progress in a quarterly report and give users a dashboard showing the status of videos they’ve flagged to us.”