Many parents have found that their children are savy at surfing the Internet, and the children either have found or will find their way to YouTube to view their favortive cartoons. This article is not designed to point fingers but simple to inform people that there are unseen dangers of exposure to profanity.
Jokerster will take a normal episodes of a cartoon and dub over (voice over) the original sound track, the result is that your children will potentially be exposed to unwanted profanity. The YouTube community guidelines set forth common-sense rules and they ask that everyone abide by them; you may think that by injecting profanity into a video is wrong or that it should be removed. This is not the case, the jokester is only exercising their freedom of speech and this is encouraged.
Additionally, YouTube has a policy that states that you must be at least 13 years old to sign up for an account. By doing this, you are afforded the opportunity to set the new Safety Mode on your account. Now back to the savy Internet surfer who is probably under the age of 13. They are protected so some extent from viewing inappropriate material, however many of the videos that are dubbed over are still available without signing into an account. So how do you protect your little web surfer?
Wagworx has created a browser plug-in for Internet Explorer and Firefox that will read the closed caption file before the video starts and determine if the video contains profanity. If detected, the little surfer will be redirected to the homepage of YouTube.
The add-ons can be found at http://www.wagworx.com/download.html. By installing the add-on for your browser you are adding a tool to your parenting arsenal to help keep your child safe.