Toy Freaks

» see youtube.com/user/ToyFreaks as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Toy Freaks was a YouTube channel out of Granite City, Illinois, run by a single father named Gregory Chism, who filmed himself and his two young daughters in staged gross-out situations. The girls pretended to be infants and spat out baby food, and in one video a live frog was dropped into the bath they were sitting in. Between 2012 and 2017 the channel collected 6.9 billion views, and at the end it had 8.53 million subscribers and sat inside the hundred most-watched channels on the platform. The Guardian put it 68th.

In November 2017 the writer James Bridle published an essay about what the children's end of YouTube had turned into, and this channel was one of his examples. The cluster it belonged to got a name shortly afterwards, Elsagate, borrowed from the bulk-produced videos of cartoon characters in violent or sexual scenarios that sat beside it in the recommendations. YouTube Kids was drawing from the same catalog, so a good number of parents met it there.

This one only ever reached me as a story about moderation. The channel started when I was twenty-eight and its audience was four, and the videos themselves are difficult to watch for fifteen seconds. What carries across is the mechanism. The same autoplay grammar ran in Turkish without needing any translation, because unboxing and gross-out do not require a language, which is why a channel from a small town in Illinois could collect billions of views from children who had never heard of Illinois.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ why it got so big ~

Children's video on YouTube in the mid 2010s ran on thumbnails and on autoplay. A child who could not read could still work it by picture, and the recommendation system supplied the next thing without anybody choosing it. Channels that optimized for that loop grew at speeds no television show could reach, and the optimization had no opinion about whether an adult would approve of the result.

That is the uncomfortable part of the arithmetic. Nobody at the company commissioned any of this, and the system that distributed it was measuring watch time on an audience that was four years old. A format that works on a toddler and works on nobody else is still a format with a few billion views in it.

~ the purge ~

YouTube rewrote its community guidelines around content featuring minors on 16 November 2017. Toy Freaks was terminated the following day, 17 November, under the child endangerment policy. The company's statement said it had recently tightened enforcement "to tackle content featuring minors where we receive signals that cause concern". Freak Family Vlogs, a related channel with 4.7 million subscribers, was cut to a single video in the same sweep, and KiddieToysReview lost videos as well.

Five days later, on 22 November, YouTube said it had removed more than fifty channels and thousands of videos. The St. Charles County police had already examined the Toy Freaks videos, concluded that no law had been broken, and stated publicly that Chism was not under investigation. Both of those things were true at the same time.

~ what the deletion took ~

The termination took the videos with it, so the primary record of what 8.5 million subscribers had been watching is now secondhand, held in news coverage and in Bridle's essay. Chism kept other channels, one of them about lawn care. What the deletion did not touch was the economics underneath: the children's end of YouTube stayed the fastest-growing part of the platform, and the enforcement fight moved on to COPPA and to the comment sections, where it produced another round of mass deletions two years later.

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