A recent report by the New York Times and a viral blog post by artist James Bridle called attention to a disturbing trend on YouTube: Some explicit and violent videos are slipping through the platform’s content filters by using popular children’s show characters such as Peppa Pig.

YouTube owner Google LLC is not happy about this, so today the company announced that it is taking steps to crack down on these videos. Starting today, Google will age-restrict all inappropriate videos masquerading as children’s shows. On its support page, Google notes that age restricted videos are not eligible for either monetization or advertising.

It is unclear how much of an impact this change will have. Most adult content on YouTube is already flagged as restricted, requiring users to sign in and confirm that they want to view the videos. YouTube Kids, Google’s standalone video platform for children, has additional protections that are supposed to filter out all restricted content. Google even added more protection features to the platform last week, but it appears that some inappropriate videos are still slipping through.

YouTube admitted last week that “no system is perfect,” but although Google may never be able to completely ensure that children will never see inappropriate videos, Bridle said in his blog post on Monday that this stance does not work for YouTube Kids. “YouTube Kids, an official app which claims to be kid-safe but is quite obviously not, is the problem identified, because it wrongly engenders trust in users,” said Bridle, who also voiced concerns that some users might be intentionally creating violent content targeting children.

Malik Ducard, global head of family and learning content at YouTube, downplayed the prevalence of unflagged videos slipping through YouTube’s filters, telling the New York Times last week that the videos were “the extreme needle in the haystack.” Ducard added that Google is still concerned with making the platform as family-friendly as possible. He said that the site uses machine learning and other advanced technologies to detect and flag inappropriate content as quickly as possible.

Photo: Rego – d4u.hu via photopin cc