Machine Made Horrors: The Death of Elsagate
It reached the point that you knew it by a few seconds of sound. Children pacified with iPads, weary parents in coffee shops and restaurants. Over the noise of conversation and background chart music, an awkward, accented, not quite human voice performed a mantra. Arguably the anthem of Elsagate.
Daddy finger, Daddy finger, where are you…
Like the turning of a key, beyond this chant lay a technicolor hellscape. A surreal delve into a garish mash up of syringes, ‘double pregnancies’, killer toilets and so much blood. Family channels that made Daddyofive look wholesome.
A lot of this content is lost to Youtube finally responding to calls to address this problem. Perhaps it’ll take a TED talk to make them reconsider allowing fake Ugandan dog rescue content, or people filming starving infant macaques dying in cages, y’know, cos monetization. When people work out the fact there’s good money in cutting a dogs leg off and sharing the photos on Instagram, they’re gonna do it until Instagram intervenes.
What set earlier Elsagate apart was the feeling that there was more to it than an unethical money grab. There was a human element, live action sequences, actual thinking behind the malevolence. It couldn’t just be explained away as clickbait and content farming.
For a while there was a ‘Baby Hulk’ Elsagate niche. This featured real children with green facepaint throwing plates across a kitchen, gorging on junk food and occasionally taking a swing at their exasperated parents. It was the polar opposite of the teaching experience we’ve come to expect from children’s entertainment. It set loud, violent and destructive behaviour as the aspirational standard.
The example set by Baby Hulk was to use the bath as a toilet and frisbee lunch at your beleaguered parents head. As a one off, it would be weird. But this was a genre. A rabbit hole. Many wondered if was intended to be suggestive. More than just cheap clickbait. Effort, intent and time went into this content. But why this particular theme?
Whilst the Baby Hulk concept appears to have vanished, the keyword still brings up some of that classic YouTube Kids content;
The advent of AI has arguably allowed Elsagate to take on more industrial scale proportions. However I feel it has become something else entirely. The spirit of Elsagate has not survived into AI. The Indian channel responsible for 10,000 variations of Finger Family can now multiply their output ten times over with the use of simple prompts. Although there is no longer reason to speculate the motive being anything other than money. No almost paranormal terror lurking beneath the surface.
This was not always the case.
When Elsagate began to come to prominence, people were asking why and drawing conclusions based on what they saw. The line between analog horror fiction and reality became increasingly blurred. Speculation around Elsagate increased in relation to the sheer weirdness of the subject matter. It was a problem to be resolved, but first understood.
For a period at least Elsagate and Pizzagate intersected.
Pizzagate, depending on where you lean politically will likely mean one of two things. One side will recall really, really creepy images of children being shared on Instagram with comments about parties, and rich weirdos owning statues of Jeffrey Dahmer victims. Comments about ‘chicken lovers’ and strange, coded interactions. The other will recall a deranged gunman storming a pizzeria. The thing is, neither of these recollections would be entirely wrong.
Something weird was happening, but the political dimensions ultimately shaped the outcome of that situation. The conversation became heightened and ideologically charged, either confirmation biases or a refusal to engage with the subject matter entirely set in.
Reddit, being overtly left leaning were quick to shut down any suggestion that Elsagate had aspects about it that suggested mind control or grooming. MKultra was a right wing talking point and therefore had no place in the discourse. They did not want Elsagate to be the next Pizzagate.
I do sympathize to some extent. I doubt the owner of /r/Elsagate wanted to be held answerable for a gunman showing up at YouTube HQ.
But there’s an overarching, inescapable reality. Both the Instagram account of Comet Ping Pong and early Elsagate content were really, really weird. And money making wasn’t sufficient to explain it all away.
They were separate subjects, but the pull towards both was the idea of more being beneath the surface.
From The Verge
Many r/elsagate members firmly believe that there is some darker strategy at work within these videos that has yet to be revealed. “I believe there is something much more sinister going on with these videos, like mind control or behavior modification,” one r/elsagate member told me. “No evidence to back this up, but those sorts of videos have existed in the past and been used by governments for torture and brainwashing.”
Whilst members of the subreddit were warned against cultivating Pizzagate adjacent theories about child abuse rings, the hypnotic and surreal themes that made up the tapestry of Elsagate were at least acknowledged for their sinister potential. They were unavoidable and impossible to ignore.
As the rabbit hole got deeper and weirder, some people saw opportunities. Elsagate imagery was incorporated into an ARG. Further to this, the ARG focused on a real world cult and location, The Finders and Pelzer. It baited the curiosity of all those caught up in mysteries of Elsagate. The Return to Pelzer ARG was for a brief period integrated into Elsagate.
Some were convinced the Pelzer ARG, which concluded with the inadvertent player discovering a Nintendo ROM, a reskinned Friday the 13th, was the answer to the Elsagate. A shadowy, decades old cult operating from the ghost town of Pelzer had expanded their operation to the Internet. In the form of color coded mind control videos.
It seems absurd now, but for a while at least ‘Return to Pelzer’ captured the imagination of those investigating Elsagate. People were desperate for answers and they ran with Return to Pelzer. There was hope in unravelling the Pelzer mystery they might find answers to all the questions Elsagate had raised too.
Something about Pelzer and the Finders cult tapped into the spirit of Elsagate. In all of its curiosity and investigative zeal, they ran with Return to Pelzer as a lead. Eventually they conceded to a dead end.
Some were critical of the ARG. They viewed Elsagate as something profoundly detrimental to children and authentically sinister. To exploit this situation for an ARG was either a distraction from a real world horror, or a cheap act of bandwagon jumping.
It’s still unclear how traumatic the videos really are, but the impression has been driven home by some members’ testimonials. In one post, a parent says her autistic four-year-old is still affected by Elsagate videos more than two months after she cut off access to YouTube. “He still obsessively repeats the strange, distorted screeching and screaming sounds heard in many videos, in deep and growly voices,” she wrote in a post. “He still cries for YouTube and has actual meltdowns over not being allowed to watch it.”
The Verve article reminds us of the real concern that was central to the initial discovery of Elsagate, that these videos were traumatic and harmful. Whilst Return to Pelzer has been abandoned to history, an almost forgotten niche chapter in a wider story, I am told Elsagate endures.
So I decided to venture into YouTube Kids to see for myself what the current state of this strange phenomenon was. Particularly in light of the development of AI. I remember how legitimately creepy the discovery of Elsagate was, seeing something so fundamentally wrong and unexplainable happen in real time. I wanted to see how much of that eeriness still exists.
Glancing over the surface, the YouTube Kids appears to have been massively sanitised, with a crackdown on typical Elsagate content.
Searching for old Elsagate keywords simply yields a search error;
With some searching I found a couple of Elsagate style oddities;
But to find the real weird stuff, you have to be using the YouTube website. AI cats appear to be a major successor of the Elsagate tradition. Remember those ubiquitous cartoons of a drunk Mickey Mouse beating his kids to death, and then they’d turn into ghosts and haunt him? This appears to be the modern equivalent;
It’s weird, but slop is slop. It was the unknown, the still unknown aspects of Elsagate that made it so sinister. A machine prompt intended to generate clicks is just that. We get it. It’s brainrot.
So I figured I’d look for some old fashioned Elsagate horrors. I’d have to try particular search terms and see what results they yield.
Honestly, not much. Dame Tu Cosita and Elsa appear to have got together after a presumable Elsa and Spiderman breakup. And their interactions are generally less disturbing and age inappropriate than we’ve come to expect. They seem better for each other.
The closest successor to Elsagate is low effort AI click and comment bait. And this kind of content is not specifically targeted at children. Animal abuse content creators utilise it as they no longer always actually have to abuse and ‘rescue’ a cat, they can just have AI generate an image of a crying, pregnant cat begging for milk and boomers will leave sad reactions. Don’t get me wrong, the animal abuse still goes on, but perhaps AI may put a dent in its scale.
The eradication of Elsagate content from YouTube proves changes can be made and things can be done. The AI slop we see churned out by the successors of the Elsagate generation is weird, but we know why it’s weird. Someone prompted a machine to do something in broken English. In the hope of generating attention.
Elsagate content in contrast was deliberately and carefully contrived. It was thematic. It was humans, not machines that decided to have Elsa cutting her tongue off and to play this out. In video after video after video.
Personally I do not believe Elsagate has a successor, it was censored into obscurity and AI emerged in the void left behind as its own beast.
What fascinates me now is the legacy left behind by Elsagate. A generation of children raised by evil clowns chasing down Elsa’s with kitchen knives are fast approaching adolescence. We speculated that these children were subject to trauma based mind control and were test subjects in an experiment we could only speculate the purpose behind. What if there was some truth to all of that, and we’ll start seeing the consequences unravelling in the coming years.
A generation of sleeper cells waiting to be triggered into action by unexpectedly hearing ‘Daddy Finger’ at just the right time.
Or perhaps we might see interviews with the former Baby Hulks and child actors from the Elsagate years. Not to forget the first family of Elsagate; Toy Freaks.
The decline of Elsagate proves the fake rescue channels, baby monkey torture perverts and Ugandan dog shelter scammers could all be relegated to their own dark chapters of Internet history. Despite the millions of views and their financial success, when the right pressure was applied YouTube finally acted.
The machine made horrors of AI are the low effort successor to Elsagate. Still, whatever Elsagate was continues to loom as a kind is spectral unanswered question. Its real purpose, the thinking behind its design all unresolved.