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  • 2021-11-03 (xsd:date)
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  • Is an 'Evil Santa' on YouTube Kids? (en)
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  • In November 2021, a Facebook user posted a message to warn parents about a scary situation that had supposedly taken place in her home. Les Lenn Oxx wrote that her 5-year-old son William was watching YouTube Kids when an evil Santa appeared and told him to harm himself and his parents in order to get more presents for Christmas: This story, at the moment, is unverified. There are no screenshots of this evil Santa, nor any copies of the alleged video on which this rumor is based. We also have not seen any other reports about children encountering an evil Santa on YouTube Kids. A spokesperson for YouTube told us: It should be noted that Oxx's message, which has racked up close to 90,000 shares, claims that parents pay extra for parental controls on YouTube Kids. But that's not the case. As YouTube's spokesperson notes above, YouTube Kids provides free tools to customize their children's experience. You can read more about the available parental controls here. Little information is available about this specific rumor. While there is no real evidence for it, it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility. There have been a few instances over the years of trolls inserting self-harm messages into YouTube Kids videos. However, similar rumors claiming that children were being encouraged to harm themselves proved to be hoaxes. Vox reported: Images of a demonic chicken lady are stoking panic across the globe, with warnings of a dangerous suicide game that targets children on social media. But behind the hysteria linked to the so-called Momo challenge is an issue far more revealing: This urban legend is likely little more than a hoax fueled by media reports and parents’ fears about their kids’ online activity. In 2019, after a clip of YouTube troll Filthy Frank promoting self-harm was inserted into a cartoon that was available on YouTube Kids, a YouTube spokesperson told Buzzfeed News that the company work[s] hard to ensure YouTube is not used to encourage dangerous behavior and we have strict policies that prohibit videos which promote self-harm and that 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. The viral Facebook post reads: (en)
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