The videos themselves had background music but no dialogue. The channel showed people dressed as characters like Spider-Man, Elsa, and the Joker engaging in bizarre or nonsensical actions. In June 2016, The Guardian published an article about the channel Webs and Tiaras, which had been created in March of the same year. In late November, the platform deleted channels and videos falling into the Elsagate category, as well as large amounts of other inappropriate videos or user comments relating to children. That year-after reports on child safety on YouTube by several media outlets-YouTube adopted stricter guidelines regarding children's content.

Public awareness of the phenomenon grew in late 2017. They also included automatically placed commercials, making them lucrative to their owners and YouTube. In order to capture search results and attract attention from users, their titles and descriptions featured the names of the fictional characters, as well as keywords such as 'education', 'learn colors', and 'nursery rhymes'. These videos were difficult to moderate due to the large scale of YouTube. The videos were sometimes tagged in such a way as to circumvent YouTube's child safety algorithms, and some appeared on YouTube Kids. Most videos in this category were produced either with live action or Flash animation, but some used claymation or computer-generated imagery.

The controversy also included channels that focused on real-life children, such as Toy Freaks, that raised concern about possible child abuse. The term itself is a portmanteau of Elsa, a character from Disney's Frozen known for frequently appearing in such videos, and '-gate', a suffix for scandals, with the analogy originating from the Watergate scandal. These videos often featured fictional characters from family-oriented media, sometimes via crossovers, used without legal permission. Examples included injections, mutilation, childbirth, urination, fellatio, and chemical burning.Įlsagate is a controversy surrounding videos on YouTube and YouTube Kids that were categorized as 'child-friendly', but contained themes inappropriate for children. Controversy concerning a genre of YouTube videos Elsagate thumbnails featured familiar children's characters doing inappropriate or disturbing things, shown directly or suggested.

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