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Ed. Magazine

Tagging Twilight Sparkle

(Or, What Happens When You Get a Job Watching TV All Day)
Tagging Twilight Sparkle

At first, the babysitter didn’t know what to make of her new boss spending hours obsessively analyzing cartoons all day. Things were especially questionable when Tracy Elizabeth, Ed.M.'10, Ed.D.'17, watched the same episode of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic over and over and over again.

“I spent more than five hours in a single afternoon watching Twilight Sparkle, the main unicorn pony, figure out how to protect her friends from a feared pony named Nightmare Moon,” Elizabeth says.

The sitter, as it turns out, didn’t have anything to worry about: Elizabeth had just started her new job with Netflix as the lead content tagger for children’s media and had to spend hours watching kids’ shows and movies and then decide how to tag, or code, the content.

“The tags help Netflix identify, in nuanced detail, what content exists in the shows,” she says. “We then categorize the shows based on a combination of tags that they have in common” — tags like “goriness” and “smoking,” or, in the case of My Little Pony, possible warm-hearted themes of friendship. Netflix uses the tags to create the “because you watched... ” or “top picks for... ” categories on a subscriber’s main page.

For adults looking to watch a new show or series, these recommendations can be fun, Elizabeth says. But for kids, detailed tagging has a second, more important function.

“If Netflix suggests that a kid watch a high-violence show, that’s a problem,” she says. “We have to be a gatekeeper for what is fed into their queue.” (Although, Elizabeth adds, this has nothing to do with censorship or cyber-parenting. It’s still up to parents and families to decide what content is most suitable.) “I always think of myself as a protector of children and that young viewers have a team watching out for them, not only for what they enjoy, but what’s developmentally appropriate.”

That could be why the “violence” tag is probably considered the most when it comes to evaluating kids’ shows. (Some of the least used are “horror,” “political friction,” and “medical research,” she says.)

“Not all kids’ shows contain violent themes, yet it is important for taggers to evaluate all shows to determine if violence does exist,” she says. “If there is violence, we measure the magnitude of the violent acts and the type of violence in that show. For example, there is a difference between a show like Word Party, which is educational in tone and contains no violence, to Dinotrux, which has some high-energy action where an animated machine may get banged up.”

Elizabeth says there are less obvious tags used for kids’ shows, including “perilous situations” and “strong female lead” — the latter one of her favorites.

“We use this to identify when a lead protagonist in the show is female. This lets us highlight shows that may appeal to youth who wish for strong women or girl role models in their lives,” she says. “I’m inspired by the ‘strong female lead’ tag because I can see a trend in the newer media content that is being produced for youth,” tilting toward more female characters who are strong leaders and who succeed at whatever they’re doing.

With all of this behind-the-scenes knowledge of Netflix content, Elizabeth says it’s not uncommon for friends with kids to ask her for show recommendations.

“I can’t gush enough about how much I love Project Mc2 for its girl empowerment and STEAM education. Also, as a huge Beatles fan, I adore Beat Bugs for families with kids who are into music,” she says. “And, while it’s made for adults, Stranger Things is an addicting blast from the past. It stars a cast of tweens whose characters deftly model problem-solving and conflict-resolution skills while eerie supernatural events increasingly complicate their lives.”

Elizabeth acknowledges that she could talk about her new job endlessly. “Can you tell I love Netflix content? It’s the only job in the world where when I clock off, I still tune in.”

Ed. Magazine

The magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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