The Babysitter is Bleeding

There is a reason the child is quiet. And it isn’t because they are safe.

The silence is bought with a screen. A screen that hums with colour and songs and characters that look like they were drawn by a machine on drugs. Because they were, what used to be a babysitter has become something else entirely, conjured by algorithms, funded by ad dollars, and ignored by adults who should know better.

We are not watching the decline of children's content. We are watching its inversion. What was once made to educate and soothe is now engineered to disturb, distract, and deform. The market for a child’s attention has always existed. But it used to have gatekeepers. Animators. Scriptwriters. Standards. Now, all it takes is a keyboard and a prompt. Type “cute cat in trouble,” and let the machine hallucinate violence in rhyming couplets.

The monsters wear smiles. The music is gentle. But make no mistake they are monsters. This isn’t a glitch in the system. This is what the system is now.

Somewhere, a three-year-old watches a cartoon cat starve to death while its mother dances in a loop to royalty-free xylophone music. The parent hears the music and thinks it’s fine. It sounds like Baby Einstein. It’s not. It’s content born from an intelligence that doesn’t sleep, doesn’t think, doesn’t care. An intelligence trained to keep that child staring, regardless of what they’re staring at.

Elsagate was the name given to a wave of grotesque, algorithmically gamed videos that flooded YouTube around 2016 and 2017, featuring beloved children’s characters like Elsa, Spider-Man, and Peppa Pig in violent, sexualised, or deeply disturbing scenarios. These weren’t fringe animations buried in the platform’s depths. They were engineered to appear on YouTube Kids and autoplay into toddlers’ queues, cloaked in bright thumbnails and familiar names. The content was surreal, often nonsensical, but carried a steady undercurrent of psychological violence: needles, abductions, bondage, childbirth, and death, all animated in garish colours with nursery music playing softly in the background. It was a machine-made horror disguised as play, and it exposed just how easily children's innocence could be weaponised for views and ad revenue in a system that prioritised engagement over safety.

It’s tempting to blame the platforms. And yes, they deserve blame. They’ve built something too big to govern, too profitable to clean up. They promise moderation, but what they mean is PR. They release statements about “quality principles” while the worst sludge keeps bubbling up in plain sight. They play whack-a-mole with channels that spawn faster than they can be flagged. They say they’re working on it. But they aren’t working fast enough.

Because they don’t have to. The outrage dies down. The journalists move on and the advertisers come back.

And still, the child is quiet.

But the deeper rot isn’t the algorithm. It’s the apathy around it.

We haven’t handed our children over to the internet. We’ve been cornered into it.

For many parents, screens are not a choice; they are a lifeline. They’re what lets dinner get made, work emails answered, and a moment of silence stolen after a day that never ends. The feed becomes a helper. A moment of stillness. And why wouldn’t it be? The apps promise learning. Engagement. Harmless songs and stories. The thumbnails are cheerful. The titles are reassuring. The names are familiar.

But behind those pixelated smiles is a darker truth. The truth is that the internet was never built to care about children. It was built to keep them watching.

Not all content is poisoned. But the worst of it, the grotesque, the uncanny, the algorithmically summoned grotesqueries, doesn’t need to be sought out. It finds its way in. No filter, no rating system, no well-intentioned metadata can reliably distinguish between “educational animation” and a synthetic cartoon where a kitten is beaten, revived, then serenaded by a robotic lullaby about forgiveness.

If that sounds exaggerated, you haven’t seen what passes for kid-safe anymore.

Read more here: https://substack.com/@thisiskirra/note/p-162902664