2017/07/04 by Camila Souza Araújo, Araujo, Camila Souza, Gabriel Magno +9
Social Sciences · #Child Development and Digital Technology #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Media Influence and Politics #Social Media and Politics #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1707.00971
openalex publication_date 2017/07/04 · openalex created_date 2022/10/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Online video services, messaging systems, games and social media services are\ntremendously popular among young people and children in many countries. Most of\nthe digital services offered on the internet are advertising funded, which\nmakes advertising ubiquitous in children's everyday life. To understand the\nimpact of advertising-based digital services on children, we study the\ncollective behavior of users of YouTube for kids channels and present the\ndemographics of a large number of users. We collected data from 12,848 videos\nfrom 17 channels in US and UK and 24 channels in Brazil. The channels in\nEnglish have been viewed more than 37 billion times. We also collected more\nthan 14 million comments made by users. Based on a combination of text-analysis\nand face recognition tools, we show the presence of racial and gender biases in\nour large sample of users. We also identify children actively using YouTube,\nalthough the minimum age for using the service is 13 years in most countries.\nWe provide comparisons of user behavior among the three countries, which\nrepresent large user populations in the global North and the global South.\n