In early November, The New York Times reported a mother who found her 3-year-old watching a video titled "PAW Patrol Babies Pretend to Die Suicide by Annabelle Hypnotized" on the YouTube Kids app. In this video, some of the characters from the Nick Jr. series died after their vehicle crashed into a light pole.

    Other disturbing movies with characters such as Peppa Pig and other popular characters drinking bleach or doing other sinister activities are apparently widespread across the channel. The videos imply they are teaching the children nursery rhymes, colors, or other activities, but are actually showing inappropriate content to young viewers.

   In a more recent YouTube event, the algorithms were manipulated so that whenever someone searched “how to have …”, the suggested searches were filling in with results like “how to have sex with kids.”

BuzzFeed reported on this incident and postulated the occurrence was probably caused by people gaming YouTube's algorithm. If a group of people really wanted to, they could search for disturbing content, such as ‘how to have sex with kids’ frequently enough to make the search result seem popular enough for it to autofill the suggested search result.

   A second type of child endangerment on the site emerged as well. Videos of children on YouTube, some even uploaded by children themselves, started attracting explicitly pedophilic comments.

    While these incidents are being closely monitored and fixed as quickly as possible, it’s a reminder that even when our children are in “safe” areas of the internet, there are still dangers. Children need to be monitored regularly when they are accessing online content.