Episode Details

New youtube channel for darknet stories: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7GskUS4VIIekk-SnfwVFWAThese stories will be presented on this podcast but will be separated on YouTube because of YouTube's draconian policies. Subscribe if you want to or listen to them here.Good evening friends, it's Spooky Boo Rhodes coming to you from Sandcastle, California. Today I'm going to talk to you about the dark side of YouTube. Yes, there is a hidden dark side of YouTube that no one seems to either acknowledge or talk about. I'm not talking about the typical stories about skinwalkers, creepypastas, or even horror movies. I'm talking about the real dark type of videos. Things you would expect to only find on the darknet hidden deep in the dark web, but somehow managed to fool adults into allowing their children to watch these eerie videos. Were they made for children to groom them or get them ready for something darker in life? Or, were they made for adults with a bad sense of humor? Listen and make your own judgment.I've been working with the internet and the world wide web for quite some time and I can tell you creepy stories as a system administrator working at an ISP. The things people put in their personal directories and leave in there can be rather disturbing. I would be asked to remove content from a directory or email one of their videos had corrupted by taking up too much space. Why they keep them there is beyond me, perhaps they are looking for a place to store their private porn collection or what have you, but these videos I'm talking about today are wide open for the world to see. Note this episode may not be suitable for all audience members.Today I'll first begin with this creepypasta by TheColdPeople. In the future, I will continue to bring you information about these weird channels and other deep web creepiness.A Group of Perverts are Targeting Kids on YouTube, I Used to Work for ThemIn the summer before I went off to graduate school, I was trying to stack as much money as I possibly could. This included working full time, taking up odd-jobs on Craigslist like helping people move, and tutoring high school students. One day while browsing Craigslist, I came across an ad for work as a junior animator / video editor. It paid $20/hour, so I instantly applied. I had passing familiarity with animation programs because my friend and I had spent years trying to design a simple video game. And my video editing was quite good, because I had run a popular YouTube channel when I was younger.I got the job. It was weirder than I expected. The company was in a nondescript business complex in Irvine, and every employee had an electronic badge that unlocked doors. Certain levels of employees could unlock certain doors. Being at the bottom tier, I could only unlock the entrance, the door to the room I worked in, and the conference room where we’d have weekly meetings. I never saw any other rooms in the building, and never spoke with anyone who worked in them.There were seven animators including me. We sat in a row of cubicles in our own small room. Our job was to edit cartoon knock-offs of popular children’s characters, typically Spiderman, Elsa, Spongebob, My Little Pony, etc. We worked on one or two videos per week, and basically we just created cartoon objects and settings. The work was surprisingly simple. There was very little real “animation” required.The job paid so much that I hardly paid attention to how strange it was. The company divided our labor in such a way that none of us animators ever saw a video in its entirety. We each worked on a few seconds of it, and often, the project would be taken away from us and transferred to another department before we