YouTube has a genuine crisis on its hands after it was revealed that comments on its site were being used to organize a child exploitation network. Major advertisers are dropping like flies. In response, YouTube on Thursday announced that it is disabling comments on almost all videos that feature minors.
YouTube has a genuine crisis on its hands after it was revealed that comments on its site were being used to organize a child exploitation network. Major advertisers are dropping like flies. In response, YouTube on Thursday announced that it is disabling comments on almost all videos that feature minors.
The controversy began earlier this month when YouTuber Matt Watson shared a video that exposed the use of YouTube comments by what he called a “soft-core pedophilia ring.” He showed that sexual predators were able to use comments to identify non-sexual video content that featured minors and would appeal to pedophiles. YouTube’s recommendation algorithm helped the predators find each other, Watson claimed, and they would trade contact information as well as links to actual child pornography. YouTube previously announced that it had banned 400 users’ accounts and deleted millions of comments in response to the news. But today it’s going further with a sweeping new policy.
In a blog post, YouTube said that it’s launching several initiatives to help protect young people. It said that it has already disabled comments on “tens of millions of videos” and over the next few months it will “suspend comments on videos featuring young minors and videos featuring older minors that could be at risk of attracting predatory behavior.
