YouTube bans man with eight million subscribers over disturbing videos of his daughters

A father has been kicked off YouTube over videos that featured his young daughters screaming, crying and pretending to throw up and urinate.

Greg Chism, of Toy Freaks, had more than eight million subscribers who watched videos of his children pretending to be babies, or screaming as he surprised them with frogs in the bath.

The channel has been terminated for violating YouTube’s updated child endangerment policy, which the Google service revised following media coverage of disturbing and bizarre videos aimed at children.

Toy Freaks videos uploaded by Chism – who called himself Freak Daddy – attracted tens or even hundreds of millions of views.

They had keyword-filled titles that often featured the “bad baby” phrase, a trend on the site that encompasses millions more videos, often crossed with food fight, superhero and other genres.

Some videos from other channels are explicitly targeted at young children with search-optimised titles including phrases like “learn colours” and “nursery rhymes for toddlers and babies”.

Mr Chism said: “YouTube informed me of concerns that my videos were attracting audience members who do not have children’s best interests in their hearts.

“Many YouTube community members expressed similar concerns, and their willingness to reach out to protect my children and all children from exploitation reinforces my faith in the YouTube community.

“Victoria, Annabelle and I want to thank our supporters as my girls have had the opportunity to develop their creativity and self-confidence over the past few years.

“Their future is bright. While it is disturbing to me that anyone would find inappropriate pleasure in our video skits, I deeply appreciate YouTube’s concerns for my family and I could not be happier with having had this remarkable experience.”

Greater scrutiny of the millions of bizarre child-targeted videos on Google’s platform follows a viral blog post by writer James Bridle called “Something is wrong on the internet”.

Mr Bridle claimed there was “something weird about a group of people endlessly acting out the implications of a combination of algorithmically generated keywords”.

He also said he had witnessed large-scale automated uploading of “decidedly off” videos including head-swapping of popular children’s characters.

He added: “YouTube and Google are complicit in that system. The architecture they have built to extract the maximum revenue from online video is being hacked by persons unknown to abuse children, perhaps not even deliberately, but at a massive scale.”

YouTube said: “We take child safety extremely seriously and have clear policies against child endangerment.

“We recently tightened the enforcement of these policies to tackle content featuring minors where we receive signals that cause concern.

“It’s not always clear that the uploader of the content intends to break our rules, but we may still remove their videos to help protect viewers, uploaders and children.

“We’ve terminated the Toy Freaks channel for violation of our policies. We will be conducting a broader review of associated content in conjunction with expert trusted flaggers.”