TECH

How big tech ruined kids’ TV

In a wood-panelled parliamentary committee room, the MPs of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee have gathered to ask three professors – leading experts on cognition, brain science and psychology – what they think of Bluey. Yes, that Bluey, the animated puppy from Australia. The Lib Dem MP Cameron Thomas reveals that he often cries while watching Bluey with his daughter. I can relate: Bluey’s parents are so unfailingly upbeat and full of energy, ideas and games that no real parent can compete. It is depressing to admit that one has been out-parented by a cartoon dog.

The committee is also sitting to ask one of the most serious questions in politics: should the government do something about the fact that young children are having their brains reprogrammed by foreign companies?

A good lobbyist, like a magician, specialises in misdirection. Create a debate about exercise or fatty foods, and people stop asking whether sugary drinks might play a role. Silicon Valley, which can afford the best lobbyists in the world, is adept at this practice: create a debate about “screen time”, and you can stop people asking more important questions about what’s on the screen.

In Britain, what children watch has undergone a profound generational shift. Blue Peter is a leading indicator of that change. In the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, Blue Peter was watched by up to eight million children. If something notable happened on the show, it became shared knowledge across the entire child population. Today, an episode can attract fewer than 20,000 viewers. It has been almost entirely displaced by YouTube, with serious implications for the nation’s most impressionable minds.

Sam Wass, director of the Institute for the Science of Early Years at the University of East London, explains that young brains learn best through slow, repetitive interaction, because they have very little prior knowledge and are busy absorbing the world’s patterns. This is why your toddler insists on reading the same book – always the worst possible book, always Gary the Celebrity Footballer’s Patently Ghostwritten Book of Second-Rate Bum Jokes – the one you are heartily sick of and daily fantasise about donating to a charity shop. Your toddler, however, is paying what Wass calls “comprehension-driven attention” to the book. Their brain is practising predicting what will come next in the story, a process that is crucial to development – even if the story itself is little more than the vanity project of a has-been actress.

There is another kind of attention, however. We cannot help but pay attention to movement. This has deep evolutionary roots, because the animals that failed to respond immediately to moving things – especially large, hungry moving things – did not survive for long. This form of attention is central to how YouTube has come to dominate children’s viewing. Its algorithm promotes videos that are most reliably compelling from the first watch, and these tend to be the ones that “cram constant movement into the screen to target very low-level brain mechanisms”, as Wass explains. Gesturing to the back of his neck, to the brain stem where this ancient director of attention resides, he adds: “It is very, very, very hard for anyone – particularly a young child – to experience movement in their visual field and not look at it.”

American cultural imperialism is usually little more than a grumble – something we tut about when we go to the cinema and realise that every option is merely a variation on Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson punching people. But here was a brain scientist from Cambridge University, Amy Orben, explaining to elected representatives that they had missed the capture of children’s developing minds by the vast machinery of surveillance capitalism; that a generation is enmired in a “content soup” in which “they become increasingly bored, yet struggle to disengage”. Orben dismissed the “digital literacy” campaigns of previous years as a “sticking plaster” against the cultural revolution that has been imposed on our children, almost from birth. She noted that £100m has been spent on long-term AI safety and regulation, but the government has largely left it to the tech giants to decide what children see.

In 1841, MPs gathered to hear about a syrup called Godfrey’s Cordial – a sedative that was administered to the children of factory workers to prevent them from interrupting their parents’ work by crying. Friedrich Engels, in his The Condition of the Working Class in England, saw it given to newborn babies. It was basically opium, alcohol and sugar; those who survived its dangerous embrace grew up “pale, feeble, wilted”, wrote Engels. Today, giving heroin to a newborn baby is frowned upon, but filling a baby’s visual field with incessant movement is the norm. 

And in some cases, it serves the same purpose. In an earlier evidence session, the committee had heard from the children’s author Frank Cottrell-Boyce, who mentioned “bundles” of CocoMelon videos on YouTube that can play for hours on end; I found a bundle that lasted more than four hours and had been viewed 26 million times. “That’s not entertainment,” Cottrell-Boyce said. “That’s sedation.”

Another thing you notice if you begin watching children’s content on YouTube is that the platform hosts thousands of videos that show the point of view of a child playing with toys. These videos are chirpy, brightly coloured and unbearably sad. They are mock versions of the imaginative play the children watching would be doing, if they weren’t transfixed by a screen. Clearly, the children watching these videos are expressing a wish to play – one video of some small hands mucking about with Peppa Pig toys has been watched 383 million times – but they can’t, because Alphabet, the $4trn company that owns Google and YouTube, has interposed itself between children and their toys. YouTube has ingested the simplest and most innocent play, and monetised it so that Alphabet’s highly paid employees can sit in nice offices, declaring themselves to be the architects of a new world.

As a journalist it is important to be reasonable and proportionate here, so I’d like to dispassionately report that I hope YouTube is destroyed forever by viruses and that Alphabet’s fancy offices fill with rats – huge, pustule-covered rats – that swarm over the screaming Alphabet executives, eating their money, defecating in their hair and clawing at their expensive clothes, leaving them tattered and smeared with rat grease. 

Sadly, this seems unlikely, but the experts agreed on a suggestion that was surprisingly quaint: make more British TV. YouTube’s triumph has been achieved not only by wrenching away attention, but by defunding our media. Production companies are going out of business at an alarming rate. ITV didn’t commission a single show for children in 2024. US tech firms (Apple, Google, Netflix, Amazon, Disney) commissioned just 12 hours of TV programming from British television companies that year. Big Tech is not really thinking about TV anyway, said Orben; when she speaks to researchers at Apple they talk about “companions” – AI chatbots and video generators that will place themselves between children’s friendships and monetise them. As I say, an army of rats is the ideal solution, but failing that, an army of new TV shows would help – good, interesting, funny, weird British TV, of the kind that has for decades been a source of national pride.

by: Will Dunn---follow https://x.com/willydunn