"Once again, the view numbers of these videos must be taken under serious advisement. A huge number of these videos are essentially created by bots and viewed by bots, and even commented on by bots. "
For the real view number of billions to be wrong bots need to account for over 90% of the views if we're only considering the two channels the article referenced.
That bot percentage would have to be much higher if you factor in other channels of similar veins. https://socialblade.com/youtube/top/500/mostviewed
Though you also have to factor in how many channels are just run of the mill content egg opening content vs more disturbing children's entertainment.
To avoid having to make a single decision about who constitutes a “trusted human” — democratize the curation process to allow arbitrary numbers of groups of humans to exist where each group can supply only one “kid approved yes/no” recommendation per video.
Then deal with the proliferation and ranking of moderation groups by making each parent manually select the set of agencies which are allowed to mark a video as child viewable. Audit the practices of the most popular agencies to ensure they consist of humans making decisions based on some human notion of child interest.
If there are insufficient numbers of moderation groups, threaten regulation or introduce regulation and provide funding for moderation non profit organizations.
This kind of setup would severely fragment the market for gaming kid psychology and likely ensure insufficient profit motive for it to continue at a meaningful scale.
The ending is as pointed as it can be. It's hard to define what the solution is and how to go about dividing up responsibility.
Technology companies create these relatively neutral platforms which then grow and are gamed. In this case these videos are vying for mass attention from children which is subsequently monetized. They optimize, tweak, and mass produce their only paying regard to amount of attention they can secure. Taste, morals, exploitation of children, and everything else are meaningless so long as their videos receive an adequate number of views.
They did a good job of extrapolating this issue to other problem areas such a radical left/right videos or conspiracy videos. Here is an example of this issue in the form of Google results from yesterdays mass-shooting https://twitter.com/justinhendrix/status/927335154707828736
I think the lion's share of responsibility lies with the technology companies and governments. I'm hesitant to have government involved in their inability to keep pace or understand new and developing technologies. It's also hard to define how to solve this problem without censoring speech or disenfranchising it. It's hard for me to define what is the absolute issue and what to call it.
A "seemingly neutral platform" can become corrupted or systematically abused. You constantly need to account for bad actors and gray actors.