A year later it's Qanon pedo chasing everywhere.
That's true, but Qanon is a different thing though. Qanon chases an imaginary campfire-story version of pedos, not real pedos. Their angle on the YouTube situation isn't "a limited and poorly-conceived system being taken advantage of by randopedos", it's, "YouTube is run by the evil cabal and is consciously, deliberately designed to aggregate and promote content of pedophilic interest and serve that content to pedophiles", which is delusional just like every other Q take.
And like every other part of Q except for the Trump-specific parts, it didn't originate with Qanon but was absorbed into it from a separate conspiracy theory some of whose proponents ended up becoming Trump supporters after Trump appeared. Have you ever heard of "Elsagate"?
This is actually an interesting thing, so let me explain it at you!
The Elsagate horror is over now or at least has like vastly waned for the most part because YouTube changed the system it was designed to exploit; but two and three years ago it caused a big ruckus when people started stumbling upon these low effort computer-generated animated kids videos, thousands upon thousands of them, featuring cheap versions of popular kids' characters like SpiderMan and Elsa from Frozen, all following one of a couple of specific formats. Many of them were nursery rhyme videos, all featuring the exact same music track but with different characters. Others had vague and simplistic "plots", stock sound effects, and never any dialogue. As time went on it became apparent that all of the videos were put together from a certain limited set of character, environment, and animation assets which grew over time to include whatever kids seemed to be interested in lately.
Later on direct copies of many of these videos were produced with live actors wearing superhero costumes (though still no dialogue); but It's been suggested that the 2D and 3D animated videos might have been generated automatically by some kind of algorithm rather than actual people, because whatever was doing the asset-gathering didn't seem very intelligent or discerning; for instance when adult YouTubers, making fun of these videos, made their own parodies that included intentional acts of extreme violence or scatological humor or other not-family-friendly things, and those videos became popular, the "real" videos eventually started unironically including these elements too. There was more than one group doing this - I mean it was obvious that the actors-in-costumes guys weren't responsible for the 3D-animated cartoons for instance, but it was also obvious that they were directly copying them to achieve the same goal because they saw that it was working.
And that goal, if it isn't obvious, was to make money off of YouTube's monetization program with the least possible effort, by exploiting children...
kind of. More specifically, they were exploiting the habit of many parents to use YouTube as a babysitter for actual babies and very young children. Here's how it worked: when you watch a video, YouTube generates a "suggested videos" list in the sidebar - you already know this. You probably also know that once a video you're watching ends, under normal settings if you don't do anything YouTube will automatically start playing whatever video was at the top of that list, and that next video will have its own generated "suggested videos" list, etc. So a parent CAN do a simple search for something like "superhero video" or "elsa video", set that video to play in front of their toddler, and they can be relatively confident that Uncle YouTube will continue to serve up video after video of the same kind all by itself forever until the parent decides to stop it. Whatever entity was making these sort of procedurally-generated "kids videos", was counting on parents to be doing exactly that - because (at that time at least) YouTube pointedly didn't care whether the ads were being seen by toddlers who could barely understand English, a view was a view and you got paid. The video makers didn't even pretend otherwise; the titles of each of their videos were literally an incomprehensible salad of keywords intended only to help YouTube's internal processes find the video and get it into the "suggested videos" lists so that as many of their videos would find their way onto screens via autoplay, and the Ad Money would flow and flow. The whole racket is genuinely a little fascinating (to me at least) and you can watch a pretty good explanation of it all here:
But yeah, "Elsagate". Okay so, we know the purpose of these videos was ad revenue and that's it. But....there's a lot of people on the internet who don't think that way. They saw these videos, especially the ones featuring violence against the characters or the scatological stuff, as
incredibly disturbing (which, yeah, kinda) and unquestionably, severely psychologically damaging to any child who watched them (eh...probably not). Having very little knowledge of either the realities of YouTube's internal operation or how incredibly easy videos like these would be to churn out even in their thousands with
extremely little effort, if not by a completely automated process altogether, they just could not entertain the possibility that anything less than a very large company of people was involved, who simply could not have had any goal in mind other than deliberately mindf***ing and traumatizing children. Basically they decided that this was flat out the CIA doing some kind of MKUltra mind-control program conditioning babies and toddlers to be passive targets for pedo kidnappers by making them watch "Monkeys on the Bed" or "Johnny Johnny Yes Papa" a hundred different times with different characters each time or watching Doctor Joker give pregnant Elsa a shot in the ass that made her preggo-belly go away.
I'll admit I think that, narratively, it was a fun idea. And I'm not the only one who thought to, either; an author on the horror fiction subreddit NoSleep was inspired to write a story in which the narrator is a computer programmer who was hired by a mysterious company that ended up producing videos like these, with his life being threatened by his managers when he started poking around and Learned Too Much. The story was apparently mistaken for nonfiction in China and prompted the Chinese government to
ban all videos of this type domestically, along with related search terms (you can't search for "pregnant Elsa" in China now).