Children and YouTube: Access to Safe Content

Watching cartoons is part of a child's daily routine. Today the Internet and social video repositories such as YouTube encourage exploration for new online videos, but pornography is dramatically pervasive on the Internet and children may accidently access inappropriate content. In this paper, we first introduce the problem by showing a real example in which audio porno content was substituted for the original audio of a famous Disney cartoon. Next, we discuss the effectiveness of the YouTube user interface for signaling inappropriate content and propose some suggestions, such as delivering the nature of the retrieved content before accessing it, that could be adopted to improve its safety for children.