YouTube bans comments on videos with children to stop paedophiles
GOOGLE has finally bowed to pressure from advertisers and promised a crackdown on paedophiles on YouTube.
The tech giant is set to disable comments on virtually every YouTube video featuring children amid fears the website has become a haven for predators.
It was forced to take action after major brands including Disney and Nestle pulled their adverts due to overwhelming evidence of paedophiles invading the website.
The criminals descend on innocently-posted videos of girls doing gymnastics or performing dance routines, posting in the comments section to share links to private child sex abuse messaging groups.
The predators also post lurid messages about the children, even directly asking them to perform sex acts.
Now Google- owned YouTube has banned comments on tens of millions of videos with ‘young minors’, and plans to ‘broaden this action’ to virtually every video of pre-pubescents. And using artificial intelligence, the firm will axe comments on videos showing older children where the footage is ‘at risk of attracting predatory behaviour’.
It will also deploy new algorithms to automatically delete inappropriate sexual comments faster than ever before.
The scandal was exposed in 2017, but reached a new crescendo last week after YouTuber Matt Watson laid bare the dramatic scale of the problem.
He accused Google of profiting from a ‘softcore paedophilia ring’, as he showed dozens of adverts appearing next to the shocking comments.
YouTube typically hands a slice of the revenues from these ads to the user who posted the video, while the rest helps to inflate Google’s profits.
Mr Watson’s exposé, posted on YouTube, led to a fresh revolt by advertisers which pulled their commercials from the site.
Epic, the company behind the computer game Fortnite, and food brand Dr Oetker were also among the brands.
In his 20-minute video, Mr Watson showed how YouTube used its software to send paedophiles a seemingly endless stream of videos of children.
Below the videos, paedophiles had asked children if they wore ‘panties’ and posted other more obscene comments. They also direct one another to the most titillating parts of the videos, posting ‘time stamps’ that link to their favourite moments.
One video seen by the Daily Mail purported to show a girl aged around ten, with cerebral palsy, receiving a medical massage in her underwear.
Below the film, which has been seen more than two million times, dozens of users made sexual comments.
Google will continue to allow a ‘small number’ of child ‘ crea- tors’ with YouTube channels to keep their comments open.
But they will have to ‘actively moderate’ the conversations.
YouTube said: ‘Over the past week, we disabled comments from tens of millions of videos that could be subject to predatory behaviour. These efforts are focused on videos featuring young minors.
‘Over the next few months, we will be broadening this action to suspend comments on videos featuring older minors that could be at risk of attracting predatory behaviour.’
The site has also closed hundreds of accounts belonging to paedophiles who have left sexual comments.
Last night it emerged that Google and other tech firms, including Facebook and Twitter, had written to the Government ahead of its White Paper on ‘online harms’. The firms asked that any new laws differentiate between public material and posts shared privately.
‘Attracting predators’