THE PROJECT

The Rotten Tube is a didactic project, whose main aim is to showcase, with four short experimental videos, the dangers of the Elsagate phenomenon occuring online and targeting children.

Directly downloading the contents from YouTube, following the Subreddit reports, we edited and composed the inappropriate material in order to convey, in a more clear way, Elsagate’s main characteristics and related effects.

The archive collection

The clips used in the four episodes and exposed in the storyboards below them are collected in the archive, a dedicated page area that functions as a “gallery” of the Subreddit reported videos, filtered by the four chosen representative characters, issues and status. In this section it is also possible to find more clips about the controversial videos that are still online and the thumbnails of those which, instead, have successfully been removed.

It is possible, thanks to those information, not only to have an overview of the current situation of exploited cartoons and their preferential themes, but also to grasp the possible influence and efficiency of Subreddit’s community itself.

The clips have been categorized manually and appear under one or more filtering options. For example in some cases clips show different characters or more than one issue. With issues we refer to those elements that make the video inappropriate for kids and, for this reason, reported on the Subreddit and marked as Elsagate.

The issues selectable in the archive are taken from Subreddit's reporting instructions. Some issues have been merged because of similarity and one category has been added to name a group of Subreddit Elsagate minor signals: "Distortion" in our archive stands for all those clips that show problematics that are complex to define, but that still alter the original cartoon in a disturbing way. "Violence", for instance, means that throughout the video violent action occurs, likewise "Gore", where blood and severed body parts are displayed. "Toilet Humor", refers to videos that show excrement and actions involving them; "Sexual Reference" present explicit or allusive contents about sex; "Pregnancy" marks those contents where maternity is vulgarly and disrespectfully displayed: characters that randomly get pregnant, lose their child, abort or suffer for their status.

The language

To present our web series we needed a language that matched with the problem, without being as unrestrained as the content itself, which is already extremely frightening . The scariness of the phenomenon is introduced right from the very beginning with the title and the landing page. Rotten alludes to the problems occurring on the tube, i.e. YouTube, that pollute the positive content. The first page that appears when opening this website presents the double faced aspects of the Elsagate phenomenon. By clicking on the “autoplay” button the user turns the autoplay mode on: the videos that were positive at first, suddenly turn dark and inappropriate. It is a reference to Youtube's mechanism that allows videos to be played one after the other, without the need for a user to select the next. By sliding the button the user experiences what many times happens to kids whilst watching videos that come as suggested by the autoplay system: negative content appears randomly and frequently among positive videos. To display the four episodes, we reinterpreted the visual elements and interactions that appear in many streaming platforms. We provide, for example video previews, catchy titles, brief plot descriptions, “next” function and a matching color range.

THE RESEARCH

This project originated from our previous research in the field of content farming, which is represented by our "The Tube Trap" project. Starting from videos addressed to kids, where we found recursive patterns (e.g. same rhymes, images and formats), we ended up in the Elsagate contents.

After this first phase we pushed our research a little bit further, aiming at making parents’ aware of this really subtle and mostly unknown phenomenon their kids may encounter whilst spending time on YouTube.

To do so we created four short experimental and intentionally shocking videos to visually explain how this phenomenon appears and works on the platform. All the material arranged for the videos actually comes from YouTube.

How did we find such inappropriate material?

Even for this phase, we started from Reddit, a network of communities based on people's interests, where registered users discuss various topics and upload content (links, post, images, videos). Reddit is huge and for this reason we decided to focus on its smaller section, the the r/Subreddit, an organization of content divided into boards that gathers, in one place, all the related material about different topics, usually created by users.

The Elsagate phenomenon was named and reported for the first time on its dedicated SubReddit page, the r/Elsagate. We decided to search for our material right from there, since, still nowadays, its users are discussing and creating awareness about the issue. We typed “Reddit” on the search bar, clicked on the first result and then looked for “Elsagate”.

Clicking on the r/ElsaGate we got access to all the reports from the users who joined that SubReddit. Here, people publish mainly screens of problematic channels or dangerous videos to report.

The dataset creation

We composed a dataset with all the useful information we found such as videos’ authors, channels’ name, characters involved, and reported issues in the footage. Those information were useful to pursue our research and to find, directly on YouTube, the original videos mentioned in the reportings.

Since the number of posts related to the Elsagate phenomenon is pretty big, we decided to focus our analysis on four symbolic characters: Frozen Elsa, because her character's name is the origin of the neologism; Spiderman and other masked superheroes, since they were widely popular and there is still a great interest in them; Peppa Pig, because it is much appreciated by the most little ones, and, lastly, we chose Minecraft, since it is one of the latest most trending figure exploited. Those four characters also allowed us to cover different audience's ages: 2-4 years old, 5-8 and 9+, providing a sort of scaled YouTube model.

THE ELSAGATE PHENOMENON

For a better understanding of the ElsaGate controversy, it is important to introduce the former step: the content farm phenomenon. Mysterious companies upload a huge amount of low-quality videos, characterized by massive production and content repetition, designed to satisfy the logic of YouTube’s algorithm and recommendations criteria.

In this way creators get more views and more money, with the least effort. Just imagine video content farmers making videos as they were producing clothes in huge factories: producing millions of same patterns t-shirts is by far more convenient than designing millions of different motifs. This is why content farmers take advantage from replicating the same characters, sound and effects across different videos.

Why is this happening?

The reasons behind these videos are related to the revenue people or companies running these channels get from views; for each view obtained, more money is gained. Views are also important to determine the price of advertising slots, which often interrupt YouTube videos and appear to the watchers, just like tv spots. Studies demonstrate that 81% of children under the age of 11, use, more or less regularly, YouTube. Being this young audience so active, a huge quantity of content addressed to it is produced, for a better chance to reach popularity.

Yes but why “Elsa”?

Videos uploaded on YouTube are so many that the system does not manage to supervise them all. Content farm videos offer a great contribution to this huge flow and, among them, some are targeted to children and are also inappropriate.

Under “inappropriate'' go all those videos that present shocking, repugnant, violent free of charge and obscene contents. In this scenario, in 2014, a dangerous phenomenon, later called “Elsagate”, started to spread. The term refers to all those inappropriate videos that exploit well known kids' characters (e.g. cartoons characters and heroes) to convey misleading content.

In 2014, a video titled “Disney Princess Dolls Goes on a Date!" was published and it featured Frozen’s Elsa as the protagonist, together with Ken and Spiderman dolls acting strangely, with veiled sexual references: it reached 37.384.055 views. From this moment on, this method has been extended to many other characters, but Elsa was the first one used with the purpose of attracting young viewers, giving the name to the phenomenon.

Who’s behind the phenomenon?

At the moment it is very hard to find reliable information about the origin of those videos and their authors: hypothesis that may be found on the web are not to be trusted and sometimes intersect with conspiracy theories. Without knowing the sources, it is hard to prevent them from publishing these contents. What is clear though is the fact that those who produce them have for sure economic reasons: videos that reach high numbers of views call the attention of advertisers, who see these media as an excellent monetizing source.

The Rotten Tube

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