Warning: This post contains disturbing imagery and content

Update 7/27: A local news station in Chicago has now picked up this story, and the #ElsaGate hashtag has begun gaining steam online. It also turns out the New York Post reported on these channels back in March. Will public concern inspire an investigation into these YouTube channels?

Self-styled online investigators have discovered a number of bizarre, seemingly-related YouTube channels in which cheaply-made cartoons and live-action sketches bombard viewers with disturbing and depraved themes, calling into question the intentions of those responsible for the content. The live-action content features real children.

Co-opting popular characters and viral keywords like Minnie Mouse, Elsa from Frozen, and “superhero IRL,” the videos feature repeating themes and imagery including cheating and infidelity, pregnancy and abortion, simulated sex, injections, dungeon torture, injections, and even defecation and scat eating in their content. Collectively the channels have many millions of views, presumably from children, but adults who have discovered the channels have found their content incoherent as well as highly disturbing. Due to the prevalence of the Elsa character in the content, the phenomenon has become known as #ElsaGate.

Occasional re-discovery of the videos has boosted interest in the phenomenon known as Pizzagate — especially given content like the below video, which depicts Minnie Mouse becoming pregnant due to eating a pizza. In the screenshot, a doctor is explaining to Minnie Mouse how the pizza was responsible for her impregnation:

I enlarged the playlist on the right side to show greater detail. Notice similar videos with repeating themes of impregnation, infidelity, suicide, and hypersexualization (in the fourth and fifth videos down the list, two Mickeys are shown with hearts in their eyes as they ogle Minnie after her dress has torn completely open). Also notice the many millions of views on the videos:

Dentistry and tooth extractions are some other odd fixations of many of the YouTube channels involved:

Those who have familiarized themselves with the content that came out in the wake of Pizzagate will remember that convicted billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein had a fully-stocked, functioning dental chair in his Florida mansion, and that Tumblr accounts associated with people close to key players in Pizzagate repeatedly featured pictures of children with bloody mouths and dental work:

Biljana Djurdjevic is an artist whose alarming paintings are on display in Tony Podesta’s mansion, making her another person of interest to Pizzagate researchers. Djurdjevic also painted a series called The Dentist Society.

Below is a screengrab of a video from another of the disturbing YouTube channels, this time featuring a child actor. The channel produces many videos involving feces, and on the right side you see a preview for another one of their videos depicting the child actor in the partially-opened trunk of a car:

So are these #ElsaGate videos just a manipulative way for content creators to make money from ad revenue, or is there truly a sinister intent behind them? A discussion on 4Chan led users to discover a code hidden in the comments sections of some of the videos that led them to a Twitter account.

That Twitter account had direct links to a series of anxiety-inducing unlisted YouTube videos — “unlisted” means that no search will turn them up, they can only be found if you know the exact URL. The videos feature a voice instructing what the viewer’s “trigger” is, and associates each trigger with different colors, often invoking the same characters and items featured in the disturbing YouTube channels — Mickey Mouse, Power Rangers, a birthday cake, et cetera.

As an example, one of the trigger videos might display a disturbing background while a voice says something like “Blue, your trigger is: Elsa. Red, your trigger is: Spider-Man.” The colors mentioned in the trigger videos then tend to repeat conspicuously throughout the content containing those characters:

Between the disturbing “for kids” YouTube channels, the coded comments that led to the Twitter account, and the trigger videos hidden in code on that Twitter that feature corresponding colors, characters, and objects, all have led to online speculation we are witnessing some kind of new iteration of the CIA’s MKUltra mind control program (warning — screengrab is from 4Chan, so you’ll see some commenters throwing in anti-semitic remarks):

View one of the very strange unlisted YouTube videos in question here. Embedding was disabled, so I had to use an external link. Be warned, the videos are genuinely anxiety-inducing. Here is another.

Other users’ experiments running the “MKUltra” videos through decoding software uncovered even more coded references to the disturbing YouTube Channels:

Even if there’s nothing here as sinister as a government plot to control children’s minds, I think most parents would agree that they wouldn’t want their children anywhere near this content. In fact, parents who discovered the content after seeing their children re-enact behaviors they had seen in the videos have allegedly reported some of the channels to YouTube. They were not able to get any of the videos removed by YouTube administrators.

Below is a screen grab from a video where sex is simulated between Spider Man and Elsa:

And one showing Spiderman fondling Elsa’s breasts as she grimaces and cries, with children in the background:

This one is particularly disturbing, showing content involving the consumption of feces, hopefully simulated:

These are just a few #ElsaGate examples. There are hundreds or thousands of videos that feature these themes and imagery over and over again. In the worst cases, videos show children in what appear to be states of genuine distress:

Whether or not you discount the possibility that #ElsaGate is a bona fide conspiracy, it’s clear that a great many questions need to be answered — by these content creators, by YouTube, and by Disney — about these videos. Disney, for example, typically pursues copyright claims aggressively. But the mega-corporation doesn’t seem to mind their characters being used in these videos.

Why not? Why hasn’t YouTube done more to ban the uploaders creating these videos? Who are the adults involved in producing and uploading them? Who is funding it, and who is making money from it? Something very wrong is happening here on many different levels, and you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to be deeply concerned.

The BBC reported on the videos last March, opening with a description of video about a sadistic tooth-pulling dentist. The video was dicovered by a concerned parent who was horrified to find their three-year old watching it, enthralled.

But aside from the BBC article, there’s very little news coverage of this bizarre web of YouTube content. And perhaps because of that, very little is being done outside of places like Reddit and 4Chan to figure out who is behind it, why, and what can be done about it.

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