From Peppa Pig to Trump, the web is shaping us. It’s time we fought back

Forget the canary in the coal mine: these days, the warning comes from a cartoon pig in a dentist’s chair. And it’s no exaggeration to say it’s pointing to a threat facing all humanity.

The pig in question is Peppa, beloved by children everywhere. What could be safer than settling a child in front of a few Peppa Pig videos, served up in succession by YouTube, knowing they’ll be innocently amused while the adults chat among themselves?

Except they might not be so safe. In a recent, revelatory blog post, writer James Bridle described how what might seem to the naked eye – or distracted parent – to be harmless cartoons available on YouTube’s kids’ channel are often, in fact, unofficial knock-offs, edited and titled in order to rise up the algorithmic rankings and attract lucrative page views. A human hand need not even be involved. A simple bot can simply take words or images it knows the algorithm will favour, chop them up and generate a video that meets those criteria. The result will be served up automatically, played to a child the moment the previous video has finished.