Who Is the "You" in YouTube?

YouTube videos viewed by children do not reflect the ethnic diversity of young children, tweens, and teens across the United States. In videos watched by young children, portrayals of BIPOC characters are disproportionately negative when compared to White characters. In videos watched by 0- to 8-year-olds, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) character portrayals were shallow or missing almost three-quarters of the time. For tweens and teens, ethnic-racial stereotypes, including using inappropriate accents, saying the N-word, or jokes with ethnic-racial themes, appeared in about 1 in 10 videos, on average. Videos containing ethnic-racial stereotypes had lower viewership compared to videos without stereotypes. Gender stereotypes pervaded videos viewed by tweens and teens and tended to occur in videos that also had ethnic-racial stereotypes. Teaching about race and ethnicity was extremely rare; of the 1,242 videos watched by children in the study, only two (0.002%) discussed race and ethnicity. Although tweens and teens watched videos with characters that reflected their own ethnic-racial identity, this was not the case for 0- to 8-year-olds.