YouTube's Kids App Is Coming Under Fire for Junk Food Ads

Two child advocacy groups claim that YouTube's app meant as a safe place for parents to park their kids is actually exposing them to pernicious messages.
These screenshots of a Crunch commercial found on YouTube Kids were included in the complaint filed today by the Center...
YouTube Kids

YouTube markets its YouTube Kids app as a safe space for kids online—a place where they won't be exposed to all the different kinds of kid-inappropriate content the Internet serves up so efficiently. But two children's advocacy groups are claiming that YouTube Kids is exposing impressionable young minds to another kind of pernicious influence.

The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and the Center for Digital Democracy say that they've found hundreds of commercials and promotional videos of junk food products on the app from the likes of Coca-Cola, Nestle, and Hershey. In a complaint filed today, the groups are calling on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate YouTube Kids.

“Far from being a safe place for kids to explore, YouTube Kids is awash with food and beverage marketing that you won’t find on other media platforms for young children,” the CCFC’s Josh Golin said in a statement.

Google-owned YouTube says that all ads in the Kids app are pre-approved by YouTube's policy team, ensuring that they adhere to the company's standards, which prohibit ads that show food and beverages. But screenshots provided in the complaint show what appear to be ads, promotional videos, or videos with product placement selling Reese's peanut butter cups, Crunch bars, Hershey Kisses, Nutella, and Pop Tarts.

"YouTube Kids prohibits paid advertising for all food and beverage brands. We also ask YouTube creators to disclose if their videos contain paid product placement or incentivized endorsements and we exclude those videos from the YouTube Kids app," says a YouTube spokeswoman. "The app contains a wide-range of content, including videos with food-related themes, but these are not paid advertisements." The spokeswoman adds that parents have the ability to turn off search functionality and restrict the app to a limited set of videos as well.

Launched in February, YouTube Kids is designed to offer videos for children under 12. The idea is that parents can park their kids and not have to worry about whether they're watching anything objectionable.

The consumer groups first complained to the FTC about YouTube Kids' advertising practices in April. The groups took issue with product placement-style ads in YouTube videos themselves that don't disclose that a video creator is shilling a product. Unlike adults, the groups argue, young children likely wouldn't be able to distinguish an ad from a regular video.

While there are established guidelines on the kinds of ads that can be served up during children's programming on television, the Internet is (after all these years) still new territory as far as regulators are concerned. For the advocacy groups, that's a problem as children are increasingly spending more and more time watching videos online. YouTube has said that users tend to spend 40 minutes on average on the site. For children, those 40 minutes could add up to a lot of ads.