Analysis of Results The Key to Age-Locked Videos In order to formulate a quantitative assessment of risk that the viral video challenge genre may pose, I turned to YouTube’s intrinsic safeguarding tool: ‘Age-Lock’. According to YouTube, “Age-restricted content” is content that “doesn't violate our policies, but may not be appropriate for all audiences” (Y ouTube Age Restriction) . These “age-restricted videos are not visible to users who are logged out, are under 18 years of age, or have Restricted Mode enabled” (Ibid). YouTube has dened the stipulations for age-restricted videos as something that contains at least one of the following: “vulgar language, violence and disturbing imagery, nudity and sexually suggestive content or portrayal of harmful or dangerous activities” (Ibid). Violating videos may be agged in a number of ways such as “video title, description, metadata, Community Guidelines reviews,” in order “to identify and lter out potentially mature content” (Ibid). Therefore, by aggregating which videos had an ‘Age-Lock’ imposed by YouTube, we may come to understand which challenges generally tend to consistently present more “harmful or dangerous activities”. Particularly as the platform relies heavily on public perception and participation through the ‘report’ module available on each video. While age-restricted videos are “not appropriate for all audiences” they are not directly “violating” their policies. Therefore one must question why YouTube permits the publication of content that is both “not appropriate for all audiences” and depicts “harmful or dangerous activities”. 54 As the only videos to have age-restriction imposed upon them fall into either the Harmful or Dangerous category proposed above, it is clear that despite YouTube’s “Policies on harmful or dangerous Content” there is still a lack of armative action in the case of regulation. Indeed, the rst line of their policy states that, “content that aims to encourage dangerous or illegal activities that risk serious physical harm or death is not allowed on YouTube” (Y ouTube Policy on Dangerous and Harmful Content) . However, the fact that YouTube has simply restricted the access to these videos to users over the age of 18 instead of banning them completely raises several questions of regulatory culpability. Major Risk to Minors The most important aspect of Internet regulation that this paper is concerned with is the protection of the numerous minors that regularly use the platform. As stated above, YouTube has some safety nets built into its policies in order to protect children from the many harmful videos are frequently uploaded on the site. One such example is the platform’s restriction on “dangerous or threatening pranks: Pranks that lead victims to fear imminent serious physical danger, or that create serious emotional distress in minors” (Y ouTube Policy on Dangerous and Harmful Content) . Moreover, the platform’s guidelines stipulate that uploaders are warned not to “post content showing a minor participating in dangerous activity, or encouraging minors to engage in dangerous activities. Never put minors in harmful situations that may lead to injury, including dangerous stunts, dares, or pranks.” (Ibid). YouTube’ s nal policy for the protection of children is that the video should not depict acts that “could be easily imitated by minors” (Ibid). However, despite YouTube’ s apparent desire to impose regulatory services of child-protection, they are at best unsuccessful. Disregarding the likliehood that underaged users may provide false ages for their accounts, thereby cheating the system, there are other ways that children could access age-restricted videos with ease. Indeed, a simple Google search of “watch age restricted youtube videos” results in a full page of instruction videos and ‘how-to’ pages, with each oering several methods of evasion5,6. The fact that many of the search results yielded links to YouTube instruction videos shows that there is little cohesive regulation for the protection of minors online.7 Indeed according to Dubit and Sherbert’s study of 5,000 families in the US and UK, “29% of 2-5 year-olds and 25% of 6-7 year-olds are watching videos online every day, rising to 33% for 8-10 year-olds 5Bidasaria, Gaurav. “7 Ways to Watch Age Restricted YouTube Videos Without Signing In.” TechWiser, 22 May 2018, techwiser.com/watch-age-restricted-youtube-videos/. 6 w ikiHow. “How to Bypass Age Restrictions on YouTube Videos.” WikiHow, WikiHow, 23 Dec. 2018, www.wikihow.com/Bypass-Age-Restrictions-on-YouTube-Videos.Proxy, Smart DNS. 7 Watch Age Restricted YouTube Videos Without Signing In.” YouTube, 24 Mar. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNNeGgqYpnI. 55 and 45% for 11-14 year-olds” (Dredge, Stuart. The Guardian . 7 Oct. 2014). Therefore there is a signicant number of children that are subjected to YouTube’ s age-restrictions and unable to view videos that may fall into the Harmful or Dangerous categories. However, if these children are not watching videos on their parent’s account, at any point they would be able to access age-restricted content after a swift Google search. Not to mention the multitudes of mirror platforms such as ‘www.nsfwyoutube.com’ whose tagline is “Watch YouTube videos without signing in/up for YouTube account. Bypass registration trick!” (www.nsfwyoutube.com). Websites such as this, that are available on Google’s front page, pose a great threat to at-risk children as they allow them to access Dangerous c ontent, which they may attempt to reproduce. Active Actors Upon completing the study, I was left with the 100 most viewed viral video challenges on YouTube. One key nding was the frequent recurrence of specic actors. Running the list of publishers through the DMI Triangulator tool there were several notable ndings. Of the ten challenges, two accounts reappeared within 40% of the challenges. The image below shows the result of this triangulation. 56 The accounts that recur most frequently were ‘fernanoo’ and ‘guava juice’. Both of these publishers have received over 5 Billion views between them, and have over 32.9 Million and 13.5 Million subscribers respectively. Therefore, due to their high view count one must suggest that they are established microcelebrities. The channel ‘Guava Juice’ is based in the Philippines, but operates in English, and oers a variety of platform specic content such as vlogs, music videos and various “challenges”. Indeed, ‘Guava Juice’ utilised the aordances of YouTube to create a curated playlist of over 263 videos with 20,540,461 views. Next is ‘Fernanoo’, a microcelebrity based in El Salvador who produces mainly Spanish-speaking videos. The two most frequently occurring channels have generated millions of views from their participation in viral video challenges . ‘Fernanoo’ accumulated 23,713,986 views, while ‘Guava Juice’ acquired 53,899,913 views. As both of these channels are monetized, they each generate signicant income from their involvement in viral video challenges . While one may argue that this is perfectly anodyne as neither of them participate in overtly ‘D angerous’ challenges. Opting instead to generally take part in more Innocuous challenges, with the notable exception of both exploiting the success of the Condom Challenge . However, one must note that both of these channels are complying with YouTube’s guidelines for their own benet. This is because as previously stated in the ‘minors at risk’ segment of this paper, many dangerous challenges are age-restricted and “age-restricted videos are not eligible for monetization” (Y ouTube Age Restricted Content) . Therefore, there is nothing to say that these channels would not participate in overtly dangerous challenges if they were able to monetize them. Particularly as Guava Juice already has a playlist specically called “Do Not Do This!” (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLg8oaaTdoHzMxpqfzRHzxC-qf9Ej60dBK). 57 Related Actor Networks One other notable actor in the viral video challenge genre is ‘PewDiePie’, one of the major actors on YouTube with over 90 million subscribers. PewDiePie, or Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg posted two videos that made it into the dataset studied. One contribution is to the Charlie Charlie Challenge, and the other within the Bottle Flip Challenge. Similar to ‘Guava Juice’, Kjellberg has taken advantage of YouTube’s aordances and curated a playlist of challenge videos. These 24 videos have slightly over 1.5 million views and date from June 23rd 2014 to Feb 27, 2017. The popularity of PewDiePie emphasises the assertion made by Torres and Trinidad that “YouTube tends to recommend the popular channels because they are simply great within their genre, so YouTube promotes them.” (Torres & Trinidad. 2015, p.9). Therefore, when considering microcelebrities such as PewDiePie, Guava Juice and Fernanoo, one must note that YouTube’s algorithm favours high-prole channels that frequently participate in the viral video challenge genre. In order to further prove this assertion, I have undertaken a study of my own. This is in order to better understand the “social network structure”, of YouTube and the implications of the “small-world characteristics” that are present throughout the platform (Ibid). By utilising the preceding study by Torres et al., and publications by YouTube software engineers outlining the viewing patterns of YouTube communities I was able to produce ndings that conrm assertions that the platform’s “recommendations will by nature connect channels that are more similar in content, but not directly connected” (Torres & Trinidad. 2015, p.4). Below are two examples of YouTube’s “small-world characteristics”, that manifest in “cliques and nodes” that “are linked to all others by relatively short paths” (Ibid, p.1). 58 59 60 Considering the presentation of ndings above, one may argue that despite YouTube’s eorts to restrict access to Dangerous challenges, they may actually be accountable for promoting their success. This is because, “YouTube’s recommendation algorithm” keeps “similar types of content together” (Torres et al.