History of Elsagate

This page contains information about the history of the Elsagate neologism and lists all the events related to it.

Early history
Elsagate channels have existed since at least 2007.[1] In June 2016, British daily newspaper The Guardian published an article about the channel Webs and Tiaras, which had been created in March of the same year. Apparently based in Canada, Webs and Tiaras had become in two months YouTube's third most-viewed channel with about 1.7 billion views. The channel showed adults dressed as characters like Spider-Man, Elsa and the Joker engaging in bizarre and nonsensical actions: the videos had background music but no dialogue. It also reported that several near-identical channels, named Toy Monster, The Superheroes Life and The Kids Club had appeared on YouTube.

In January 2017, one channel under control of a YouTube partner in Vietnam, Spiderman Frozen Marvel Superhero Real Life, blocked their Vietnamese subscribers after complaints from parents regarding the content of their videos. The channel's owner was later fined by Vietnamese authorities.

The high number of views have led some to voice concerns that such channels are gaming the system by using bots or click farms to inflate viewing figures to higher proportions; however, there is no evidence for this.

In February 2017, American technology news and media network The Verge commented that "adults dressing up in costume and acting out weird, wordless skits has become a booming industry on the world’s biggest video platform" and that while many videos were "puerile but benign", others featured more questionable content such as scatological humor, and violent or sexual situations. The article noted that most videos were made with a very limited budget and "a few Halloween costumes", which made them easy to produce and contributed to their multiplication. It also attributed their success to the frequent use of "Freudian concerns" which young children may find fascinating, amusing or frightening, such as "peeing, pooping, kissing, pregnancy, and the terrifying notion of going to the doctor and getting a shot".

Also in February, news website The Awl published an article on Webs and Tiaras and similar channels, describing their content as "nonsensically nightmarish" with titles like "Frozen Elsa gets CHICKEN FEET!", "Frozen Elsa gets BRAIN BELLY!", "Frozen Elsa & Anna TEAR SPIDERMAN APART!", "EVIL SANTA KIDNAPS Frozen Elsa & Spiderman!", or "Frozen Elsa FLUSHES Spiderman in Toilet!". The website commented that the videos were "pretty twisted for children's content: some videos involve Elsa giving birth, and in some others, Spiderman injects Elsa with a brightly colored liquid. You half expect the scenarios to be porn setups." In most videos, the like and dislike options were disabled, making it impossible to know how many users were actually engaging with them. Many videos featured hundreds of comments in gibberish, some being written by similar channels in an apparent attempt to attract more clicks.

In March, the British Broadcasting Corportaion (BBC) ran a piece titled "The disturbing YouTube videos that are tricking children". The article focused on a Peppa Pig imitation where the titular main character Peppa's teeth are painfully pulled out by a dentist, and a video featuring said character burning down an occupied house. The article also mentioned the existence of "hundreds" of similar videos, ranging from unauthorised but otherwise harmless copies of authentic cartoons, to frightening and gory content.

CTV News also reported in March about YouTube's "fake toons problem", with adult-themed imitations of popular children's shows frequently appearing on YouTube Kids: "In some cases, the video will feature a kid-friendly thumbnail, while the video itself might be entirely different" and be very unsuitable for small children. The network commented that such videos were "often nightmares to behold, with lots of crying and frightening scenes involving monsters and blood. Many of these videos venture into dark territory, with the characters often being chased, attacked or injured in a bloody manner."

The term Elsagate was coined on the Internet in 2017. During the summer of that year, it became a popular hashtag on Twitter as users called attention to the presence of such material on YouTube and YouTube Kids. On Reddit, an Elsagate community was created on 23 June to discuss the phenomenon, soon attracting tens of thousands of users.

November 2017-Present
In November 2017, several newspapers published articles about the YouTube channel Toy Freaks, which had been created two years earlier by an American single father named Gregory Chism. Based in Illinois, according to the Daily Mail, Toy Freaks had a total of 8.53 million subscribers and was among the top 100 most viewed, before it was shut down that month. The channel often featured Chism's daughters and in most cases featured them scared and crying.

These videos could also be found in local video platforms in China, where YouTube is blocked, including Tencent, Youku and iQiyi. Tencent have set up a specific team to monitor its video platform, and permanently shut down 121 accounts and blocked more than 4,000 search keywords by January 2018. The Ministry of Public Security of China suggested that netizens should report these videos once found.

Several celebrities, including rapper B.o.B and comedian Joe Rogan, brought awareness to the problem.

On November 4, 2017, The New York Times published an article about the "startling" videos slipping past YouTube's filters and disturbing children, "either by mistake or because bad actors have found ways to fool the YouTube Kids algorithms".

On November 6, author James Bridle published on Medium a piece titled Something is wrong on the internet, in which he commented about the "thousands and thousands of these videos": "Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatize, and abuse children, automatically and at scale". Bridle also observed that the confusing content of many videos seemed to result from the constant "overlaying and intermixing" of various popular tropes, characters and keywords. As a result, even videos with actual humans started resembling automated content, while "obvious parodies and even the shadier knock-offs" interacted with "the legions of algorithmic content producers" until it became "completely impossible to know what is going on". On November 17, Internet commentator Philip DeFranco posted a video addressing "the insane YouTube Kids problem".

The New York found that one of the channels featuring counterfeit cartoons, Super Zeus TV, was linked to a website called SuperKidsShop.com, registered in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. A man working for SuperKidsShop.com confirmed that his partners were responsible for the videos, on which "a team of about 100 people" were working. Subsequent requests for an interview went unanswered.

On November 9, members of the satirical sound collage group Negativland presented an episode of their weekly radio show Over the Edge dedicated to Elsagate. "Modern Animal Kids threads Elsagate through a remix of three 90's episodes of Over The Edge which focused on media for children, all broadcast in the final years before Teletubbies pioneered marketing to the 6 to 18 month old demographic."

On November 22, BuzzFeed News published an article about unsettling videos that depict children in disturbing and abusive situations. The information on the article came with the assistance of journalist and human rights activist Matan Uziel whose investigation and report to the FBI on that matter were sent on September 22, informing its leadership about "tens of thousands of videos available on YouTube that we know are crafted to serve as eye candy for perverted, creepy adults, online predators to indulge in their child fantasies."

On November 23, French-Canadian outlet Tabloïd released a video investigation about Toy Monster, a channel linked to Webs and Tiaras. They confronted the videos' creators – based out of the south shore of Quebec City – who refused to be interviewed. One of the actors featured in the videos anonymously stated that he was contractually obligated to refrain from comment. The investigation revealed that identical content was being posted on numerous channels apparently operated by the same people.

On November 28, Forbes presented Elsagate as an example of the "dark underbelly of the digital age". The article's author commented that the "gargantuan scale" of the problem seemed to indicate that children's content on YouTube had become "a monster beyond our control" and that "it's terrifying to imagine how many toddlers have been affected" by Elsagate, "in ways beyond our comprehension".