"My 10-year-old sweet daughter innocently searched for 'tap dance videos'," one parent wrote.

Axar.az reports citing BBC.

"Now she is in this spiral of... videos that give her horrible unsafe body-harming and body-image-damaging advice."

This is one of hundreds of accounts outlining damage said to have been caused by YouTube's recommendations algorithm.

It's a phenomenon some refer to as "falling down the YouTube rabbit hole" with users directed to controversial and potentially dangerous content they might never have stumbled on otherwise.

The accounts have been gathered by Mozilla, the organisation best known for its Firefox web browser, which competes against Google's Chrome. The BBC was unable to corroborate the posts, as the foundation said they had been collected anonymously.

It's impossible to know if all the details are true. But Mozilla says it has shared a representative sample of the messages it received. And some read like horror stories.

"She is now restricting her eating and drinking," the parent continued.

"I heard her downstairs saying, 'Work to eat. Work to drink.'

"I don't know how I can undo the damage that's been done to her impressionable mind."