Elsagate

Elsagate is a neologism referring to the controversy surrounding supposedly child-friendly videos on YouTube and YouTube Kids which contain themes that are inappropriate for children. Most videos under this classification are notable for presenting content such as violence, sexual situations, fetishes, drugs, alcohol, toilet humor, and dangerous or upsetting situations and activities.

The videos often feature popular characters from family-oriented media, sometimes via crossovers, used without legal permission; the term itself is a portmanteau of Elsa, a character from the Disney movie Frozen, who is frequently depicted in such videos, and -gate, a suffix used to refer to a scandal. However, the Elsagate controversy has also included channels such as Toy Freaks that do not feature kid/family-friendly characters but real children, and have raised concern about possible child abuse.

Their titles tend to be misleading, being a jumble of tags that hint towards the content is about nursery rhymes, yet they tend to be compilations of a recent episode combined with previous ones. They also use known trends that involve dangerous acts, such as eating tide pods.

While criticism of the channels themselves has existed since at least 2007, public awareness of the phenomenon grew in 2017, as it became part of a broader controversy about child safety on YouTube. That year, after reports by several media outlets, YouTube adopted stricter guidelines regarding children's content. In late November, the company started to mass delete channels and videos falling into the Elsagate category, as well as large amounts of other inappropriate videos or user's comments relating to children. The videos' millions of views may be due to viewers who showed these to keep their children entertained, or were the activity of bots to push them into being visible among the popular videos in YouTube. They also tend to have nonsensical comments written in gibberish in various languages.

Despite the fact that most of the Elsagate channels have been taken down, there are still remaining Elsagate channels, such as -TasMil-, an Arab Elsagate channel.

History
See History of Elsagate

Techniques
Most videos in this category are either live action films or crude digital animations, although a few channels have been using more elaborate techniques such as clay animation, or 3D animation. Despite YouTube's age restriction policies, these videos are sometimes tagged in such a way to circumvent the inbuilt child safety algorithms, even making their way into YouTube Kids, and are thus difficult to moderate due to the large scale of the platform. In order to capture search results and attract attention from users, their titles and descriptions feature names of famous characters, as well as keywords like "education", "learn colors", "nursery rhymes", etc. They also include automatically placed ads, making them lucrative to their owners and to YouTube. Despite the objectionable and often confusing nature of these videos, many attract millions of views, and some of their channels are huge.

Effect on children
Several parents or peers posting on the /r/Elsagate subreddit expressed fears that the videos were traumatizing to children.

The New York Times quoted pediatrics professor Michael Rich, who confirmed that these videos were potentially harmful to children who could find them even more upsetting as "characters they thought they knew and trusted" were shown behaving in an improper or violent manner.

Response from YouTube
In August 2017, YouTube announced its new guidelines on content and monetization. In an ongoing series of efforts to demonetize controversial and offensive videos, it was announced that creators would no longer be able to monetize videos which "made inappropriate use of family friendly characters." In November of the same year, it announced that it would implement "a new policy that age restricts this content in the YouTube main app when flagged".

The controversy extended to channels which featured not necessarily children's characters but actual children, who sometimes performed inappropriate or dangerous activities under the guidance of adults. As part of a broader action, YouTube deleted the channel Toy Freaks, which featured an American father, Gregory Chism, and his two daughters in potentially abusive situations. Chism was subsequently investigated by child protection officials in Illinois and Missouri for alleged child abuse. In December 2017, authorities announced that Chism would not face criminal charges. Before its removal, the channel had over 8.5 million subscribers.

It was also revealed in the media that many videos featuring minors – frequently uploaded by the children themselves and showing innocent content – had attracted comments from pedophiles. Some of these videos were monetized. As a result of the controversy, several major advertisers froze spending on YouTube.

On November 22, 2017 YouTube announced that it had deleted over 50 channels and thousands of videos which did not fit the new guidelines. On November 27, the company said in a statement to BuzzFeed News that it had "terminated more than 270 accounts and removed over 150,000 videos", "turned off comments on more than 625,000 videos targeted by child predators" and "removed ads from nearly 2 million videos and over 50,000 channels masquerading as family-friendly content". Forbes commented that many problematic videos could still be seen on the platform and that "the sheer volume of videos hastily deleted from the site prove that YouTube's algorithms were utterly ineffective at protecting young children".

Motives
The motives behind these videos are unknown, although The Verge pointed out that the contents may be fascinating to children. As many of the videos have millions of views and include advertisements, The New York Times suggested the videos are financially lucrative. There are some possible negative intentions as well:
 * Grooming.
 * Learned helplessness.
 * Normalize inappropiate behavior.
 * Color programming.
 * Children can imitate inappropiate behavior from the videos with severe consequences (such as driving a car).

Elsagate also became the subject of a conspiracy theory that states the videos are attempting to normalize psychopathic behavior, pedophilia or sexual abuse against minors. Some also suggest the videos may be related to brainwashing and the gibberish replies below the videos are coded message.