A warning has been issued about a disturbing trend on Youtube known as ‘elsagate’ that has parents extremely worried.
The name refers to the princess character from popular children’s movie Frozen who often appears in the bizarre content being distributed, either in cartoon form or a person dressed as the character.
Brett Lee, cyber safety expert and former undercover online detective, explained, ‘We just came across this and thought it was really interesting.
‘I’ve started talking to parents at schools about it over the past week, no parents I’ve spoken to are aware of it.’
The videos being uploaded to Youtube involve popular characters like Elsa the princess, Spiderman and Peppa Pig in ‘explicit’ scenarios.
The videos include content that shows the characters in ‘sordid sexual acts and fetishes’, ‘dismemberment’, ‘cannibalism’, and ‘kidnapping.’
The elsagate phenomenon has spawned dedicated forums on social media sites like reddit where users post some of the most disturbing content they’ve come across.
A Youtube spokesperson has today said, ‘Earlier today, our teams were alerted to this profoundly disturbing autocomplete result and we worked to quickly remove it as soon as we were made aware.’
No explanation was given about how the videos began appearing so suddenly, or how they were passing YouTube’s algorithm.
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