Some good news for once: YouTube has shut down Toy Freaks, a channel run by father-of-two Greg Chism which featured his young daughters in strange and disturbing situations. While some of the content on the channel consisted of fairly mild nursery songs, the rest of it was a disturbing play on the nausea-inducing ‘Bad Baby’ fetish; The widely watched videos showed two little girls screaming in fear, wetting themselves, force-feeding each other, and pretending to be babies along with their father. Most disturbing of all, the channel had 8.53 million subscribers and was among the top 100 most-viewed channels on YouTube.
The Google-owned video platform said it’s reason for shutting down Toy Freaks was due to widespread backlash and the fact that the company is taking a tougher stance in filtering out the type of content which was inappropriate for kids.
Why is Toy Freaks allowed to exist? It's child abuse – ppl have been complaining for years yet @YouTube does nothing https://t.co/K0MIJXrnKj
— Lauren Nolan (@laurennnolan) November 6, 2017
Chism told Variety that YouTube informed him “of concerns that my videos were attracting audience members who do not have childrens’ best interests in their hearts.” You think, dude?
“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,” he said. “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.”
“We’ve terminated the Toy Freaks channel for violation of our policies,” a YouTube rep said in a statement. “We will be conducting a broader review of associated content in conjunction with expert trusted flaggers.”
Many viewers flagged the disturbing videos, seeing them as abusive and exploitative. BuzzFeed News was able to pull some of the content from the Toy Freaks YouTube channel before it was shut down, and it is nothing less than disturbing. In some of the videos, the girls are bathing and Chism walks and scares them with animals while they scream and plead for him to stop, describes BuzzFeed News.
