Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Political attack ads’ jarring messages reach an unintended audience: Kids going online

Online ads and kids

Shutterstock photo illustration

A young boy gets ready to go online. With the 2022 campaign season in full swing, political attack ads are filling the airwaves and streaming services. Messages about abortion, cheating, lying, etc., hope to sway adult voters. Those weighty messages, though, aren’t limited to adult eyes and ears.

Your elementary school-aged child is scrolling through YouTube when they are suddenly hit with a political advertisement.

Ominous music begins playing over a bright red screen as a woman sits behind jail bars with her head in her hands. The scene is followed by text about a certain candidate wanting to jail women who have had an abortion.

When the child advances to the next video — something as innocent as Pokemon or Mickey Mouse — they encounter another advertisement with similar jarring messaging. The ads are coming from candidates, or political action committees supporting candidates, up for office in the Nov. 8 midterm election. And they are everywhere: during football broadcasts, in between songs on the radio, and sent directly to cellphones.

To an adult, they are just another attack ad among the many, but to a young child who might not understand, it can evoke confusion or even fear, according to mental health experts.

That was the reality for Kali Fox Miller when her niece and nephews began encountering political commercials through the streaming application.

“If you are on YouTube, every ad seems to be about abortion,” Fox Miller said. “This campaign cycle, if it is not every ad, it is every two out of three.”

Fox Miller, a local attorney and president of the Nevada PTA, eats dinner at least once a week with her niece and nephews — aged 8-17 before settling down to watch YouTube. Lately their quality time has been interrupted by political attack ads.

“I think my biggest concern is that these are topics that adults have difficulty with and it can cause a lot of anger and confusion, and I don’t want kids to feel that way,” Fox Miller said.

Her 8-year-old niece “has no idea what these words mean,” so “she doesn’t really know” what she’s looking at. The older children, especially the 17-year-old, have been asking questions, though.

“I don’t think they’re afraid,” Fox Miller said. “I just think they have no idea what this topic is about.”

The family sat down with the children for serious discussions, such as the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, when extremist supporters of then-President Donald Trump tried to stop the Congress’ certification of electoral votes to give President Joe Biden the win in the 2020 presidential election. They also spoke to the children following the reversal of a Supreme Court decision protecting a women’s right to an abortion.

That seemed to be a warmup for an election cycle, where the advertisements seem to be “more aggressive (and) more personally attacking,” said Kat Hertlein, a UNLV professor of couple and family therapy.

Kenneth Miller, an associate professor of political science at UNLV, said roughly 75-80% of the political commercials in Nevada will be attack ads. He said the intensity of the advertising “builds to a crescendo all the way up to Election Day.”

Miller said that political commercials aim to trigger anxiety in voting adults to “promote” people engaging in “information-seeking behavior.” They achieve this through communication techniques, like ominous music.

An “accidental exposure” from these advertisements while a child is watching television with their parents or clicking through videos on YouTube could fill a kid with questions at best and fear at worst.

However, children can receive these commercials differently depending on their level of development and their socialization around certain political issues, Hertlein said.

For younger children, they may be more perceptive of the “tone, the aggression, the attacking” whereas older children might notice the tone, but also try to understand what the content is about, she said.

This lack of understanding for young kids, along with frequent exposure and a possible lack of parental support, can cause them to “fare worse in terms of behaviors, triggers or responses,” Hertlein said.

Despite the heavy presence of these political attack ads, Hertlein believes there are still ways parents and guardians can help their children avoid the content or address it in a way that doesn’t create more confusion.

Fox Miller has one solution she uses with her niece and nephews: YouTube’s safety settings. Parents and guardians can utilize these safety settings on their accounts to ensure that children under 13-years-old are at less risk of being exposed to inappropriate or unwanted content, but this doesn’t mean they’re guaranteed protection.

“That’s everybody’s biggest fear is that somehow the safety settings will fail you,” Fox Miller said. “We really try to make the environment such that those things don’t get through and you would just hope that it doesn’t, but nothing’s 100%.”

Hertlein’s advice for parents and guardians is not to be afraid of talking with their youngsters about what they have encountered. By inviting conversations about these commercials children have seen and explaining all sides of these political issues, Hertlein said parents and caregivers could open “a safe place” for kids to have conversations about controversial issues “even if the television doesn’t look safe.”

She also encourages setting boundaries with online content by “just (hitting) mute” or turning off devices that can connect children to possibly harmful content.

“The thing about political ads on television and social media and YouTube (is) we always have a mute button,” Hertlein said. “We wanna make sure that kids feel like they’re safe and that they’re in control … if you don’t like the ads or there’s something that’s bothering you, just turn it off or look away.”

There’s only one week left until Election Day. And many children are still years away from registering to vote and taking part in democracy.

“I want (kids) to understand that this doesn’t necessarily involve (them), and (they) don’t need to have an opinion about this for a very long time,” Fox Miller said.