What Are Your Children Watching on YouTube?

YouTube is a popular video repository offering family entertainment channels. However, pornography is flooding the Internet and children can accidently access unsafe videos. Specifically, porno audio content inserted into popular cartoons is present in YouTube, with the risk of exposing children to disturbing experiences. To evaluate the diffusion of this phenomena, a questionnaire was proposed to 100 parents of children 2 to 13 years old. Results were also integrated with data collected from several interviews. This study aims to 1) assess the parents' degree of knowledge of YouTube user interface mechanisms for signaling and filtering inappropriate content 2) understand the parents' perception of children's safety. Results showed that one-third of the sample acknowledge that their children have accessed inappropriate content and many parents believe they can monitor their children "sufficiently" while carrying out other activities. Only 1/3 of parents check the video category and keywords, while 2/3 of participants know that is possible to signal questionable content but do not know how to do it. The possibility of knowing the nature of retrieved content before accessing it was judged an interesting and useful feature for improving the safety level of YouTube for children.