PEPPA PIG
Glimpsing dangers
Little kids recognize their
favourite cartoons in the thumbnails appearing on YouTube and click on them, binge-watching those videos that showcase
familiar imagery.
Peppa Pig, being a worldwide success, is one of the most exploited characters. Due to the simplicity of its two-dimensional drawings,
it is quite easy to manipulate its characters and the overall plot of an episode.
Those distortions that occur work successfully because of the audience: kids under 4 tend to watch one episode after the other, not really focusing on the footage development or on the plot itself: they are attracted by shapes, colors and sounds. The hidden danger is therefore very subtle; often the inappropriate content appears just in a small portion of the entire video.
As we tried to convey with Peppa Pig’s video, many times inappropriate frames appear for a few seconds, just like a flash, without causing a complete distortion of the whole episode, preventing, in this way, its reporting and the consequential removal from the platform. We also figured out that many times, Peppa is deliberately used to convey explicit and violent messages. To demonstrate this, we interspersed a regular episode, “Hiccups”, taken from the original channel, with inappropriate fragments, downloaded from reported videos.
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VIOLENCE
