I think you know why.
Following reports of videos that were exploiting children and “facilitating pedophiles”, YouTube is taking action. And that action is to disable comments on any videos of minors “that could be at risk of attracting predatory behavior.”
The initial report came from YouTuber Matt Watson, who stated that the platform’s recommendation algorithm enables pedophiles to “connect with each-other, trade contact info, and link to actual child pornography” via time-stamped comments on videos of children in legal, but “compromised” positions. From his post on Reddit:
One of the consistent behaviours in the comments of these videos is people time-stamping sections of the video when the kids are in compromising positions. These comments are often the most upvoted posts on the video. Knowing this, we can deduce that Youtube is aware these videos exist and that pedophiles are watching them. I say this because one of their implemented policies, as reported in a blog post in 2017 by Youtube’s vice president of product management Johanna Wright, is that “comments of this nature are abhorrent and we work … to report illegal behaviour to law enforcement. Starting this week we will begin taking an even more aggressive stance by turning off all comments on videos of minors where we see these types of comments.”1 However, in the wormhole I still see countless users time-stamping and sharing social media info. A fair number of the videos in the wormhole have their comments disabled, which means Youtube’s algorithm is detecting unusual behaviour. But that begs the question as to why Youtube, if it is detecting exploitative behaviour on a particular video, isn’t having the video manually reviewed by a human and deleting the video outright. Given the age of some of the girls in the videos, a significant number of them are pre-pubescent, which is a clear violation of Youtube’s minimum age policy of thirteen (and older in Europe and South America). I found one example of a video with a prepubescent girl who ends up topless mid way through the video. The thumbnail is her without a shirt on. This a video on Youtube, not unlisted, and is openly available for anyone to see. I won’t provide screenshots or a link, because I don’t want to be implicated in some kind of wrongdoing.
Granted, even these reports, themselves, weren’t enough to stir YouTube to act. Because, shocker of shockers, YouTube rarely seems to be motivated to fix these things until they turn into a gigantic mess.
The news gained traction when it cause advertisers like Disney, McDonalds, and Epic Games to pull their advertising (and money) from the platform. And so, YouTube finally unveiled their plan to deal with their infestation of pedophiles.
Over the past week, we disabled comments from tens of millions of videos that could be subject to predatory behavior. These efforts are focused on videos featuring young minors and we will continue to identify videos at risk over the next few months. Over the next few months, we will be broadening this action to suspend comments on videos featuring young minors and videos featuring older minors that could be at risk of attracting predatory behavior.
A small number of creators will be able to keep comments enabled on these types of videos. These channels will be required to actively moderate their comments, beyond just using our moderation tools, and demonstrate a low risk of predatory behavior. We will work with them directly and our goal is to grow this number over time as our ability to catch violative comments continues to improve.
YouTube is also working on a “comments classifier” that will deal with these types of comments more efficiently and effectively than the old system. Also, they took the opportunity to reiterate that the videos with suicide instructions were against their terms of service.
No form of content that endangers minors is acceptable on YouTube, which is why we have terminated certain channels that attempt to endanger children in any way. Videos encouraging harmful and dangerous challenges targeting any audience are also clearly against our policies. We will continue to take action when creators violate our policies in ways that blatantly harm the broader user and creator community. Please continue to flag these to us.
Source: PC Gamer
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