Jennifer Slegg - Search Engine Marketing Consultant |

Who doesn’t fondly remember some of those old school Sesame Street songs we all watched in the 70s and/or 80s? So I thought I would take a trip down memory lane showing my daughter some of the Sesame Street songs I listened to, since by the time she was Sesame Street watching age, it was all about Elmo.

So I hit YouTube, where just about every old school Sesame Street song video exists, and watched Mahna Mahna (which is technically Muppets, but was also on Sesame Street), Jellyman Kelly, What’s the Name of That Song, Echo Song etc (included the links incase any of you wish to relive your youth too!)

However, as I was watching one of the videos a week or so, I happened to glance down at the comments, which can be pretty spamalicious on popular videos to be greeted with some pretty colorful language I am sure hoping my daughter doesn’t learn for a good ten years or so! So, thankfully her attention was all on the mana mana singers, and she wasn’t testing her reading skills out on the comments, but I hastily resized that browser window smaller so the comments weren’t visible.

But it make me wonder, why is Google showing so many porn & adult language comments on kid videos. And not only that, why isn’t Google doing a better job of either filtering these comments or at least using some sort of filtering for those who aren’t logged in. Seriously, Akismet does fantastic job compared to YouTube. Google has filtering for their safe search as well as in Gmail, so why isn’t it being applied to YouTube comments too? And judging from some of the good comments on these videos, plenty of parents are using YouTube to show their kids some of these older videos too.

Now, i was not logged into my YouTube account when I saw this. So I logged in to see what the settings were. Now, I have an option to “Filter videos that may not be suitable for minors”. But what about filtering comments not suitable for minors? Other than the one filtering option, there is nothing more family friendly - such as prevent comments from showing entirely - for YouTube.

Why not at least have something in place where if it is clearly a kid’s video that comments are not shown by default? A simple click to show the comments would be a passable solution to this problem. While not all videos are tagged with things like “Sesame Street” it shouldn’t be hard to identify searches that include specific keywords like Sesame Street, Disney (and specific Disney characters), Teletubbies, The Wiggles and other common kid’s shows and entertainers and place a stricter comment filter on them or have a click to show comments rated below a +5, since it seems to be rare that some of the problem comments on kid’s videos would get at least five thumbs up if they weren’t appropriate… right now, the default is to show comments all comments until they have 6 or more thumbs down on them.

Now, there are definitely times when I see comments that are not family friendly but are still appropriate in the context of the video. I have no problem with those at all, I don’t think YouTube should be censoring everything. It is children’s videos - ones that you would expect those under age 10 to be watching on YouTube - that I think should have some kind of filtering.

Now, incase anyone at YouTube is reading this, I am not sure if these are all the exact videos I watched a week or so ago, if you are looking at the historical comment data of them. All the ones I looked at while writing this had clean comments. Was I just on the site during a bad bot run on videos that had to get cleaned up? Maybe. But even with a spam bot gone wild, something automated should be there to catch them.

I also talked about this yesterday with Jeremy on the Shoemoney show. You can listen to the show and read Jeremy’s take on it too.

Is this a “never go to YouTube ever again” problem? Not for me personally, i am continuing to relive Sesame Street 70s and early 80s videos as I write this. But it will make me carefully check any videos before showing them do my daughter, rather than my usual practice of the two of us searching together, with her pointing out the ones in the related videos sidebar.