YouTube and a Ring of Pedophilia

Last week, video blogger Matt Watson made a YouTube video claiming that there is a pedophilia ring of people that will go on videos of children and post disturbing comments and time stamp videos of kids doing things that could possibly show private parts or be more revealing.

Within these videos, sexual predators are commenting to each other sharing illegal porn and sharing similar YouTube videos to watch. He said in his video that there were hundreds of videos that could be found with these comments. He also states that the algorithm that YouTube uses will lead you down a spiral of videos that are within these categories. You could look up something simple like "kids jumping on a trampoline" and the algorithm would lead you to these videos with many comments from sexual predators. It would even lead you to videos that were the most popular within pedophile rings.

Many of the videos that would have the most comments like this were the ones with higher viewer counts. Because these videos have higher viewer counts, they are up for monetization and ads.

Once news broke, several big-name companies started pulling their ads from YouTube. Disney, Nestle, AT&T, Epic Games, and Hasbro are just a few of the companies to pull ads from YouTube in response to this story.

This is an understandable move by most of the companies that spread their brand mostly to family and children. The last thing these companies want is their ad running on a video that has children being exploited by sexual predators. Many of these companies have either pulled their ads completely or have temporarily taken them down and reached out to YouTube about what their plan is to eliminate this kind of harmful content from their site.

YouTube has since disabled millions of videos with minors in it, deleted over 400 channels, and removed thousands of inappropriate comments from videos. This is not the first time that YouTube has gotten in trouble for having sexual predators commenting and posting explicit links to videos of minors. These kinds of accusations were also brought up in 2017. In fact, AT&T pulled ads after that time and had just a month ago put their ads back on. Now they have been pulled again after YouTube falls into this same problem.

YouTube did quickly try and fix this issue and are working to make sure this is taken care of. But will it be enough? They fall into an odd place right now with certain family and kid based YouTube channels that make a living off of the monetization of their videos. These videos are now being looked at to see if there is content in it that could be misconstrued as sexual or harmful. So posting a simple video of you and your kids at the pool could be taken down or demonetized in the current state of YouTube. Monetization and comments are being instantly turned off on many of these videos. Leaving these families and children that make money off their YouTube videos with not many answers.

It's hard to tell what Youtube's next move will be. They had to do something now. But what will the more permanent answer be to ensure this will not happen again? Unfortunately it is very easy to make another YouTube account with any email, making it seem like an unstoppable battle against these sexual predators. Can they possibly find a way to block them by their ISP? Is that an answer and is that even a legal move?

It's going to be a very interesting next few months to see what YouTube's next move is to make sure this will stay gone this time. But because of the nature of their website, it will be an uphill battle. YouTube will have a lot to change in an ever-changing media source that will make this a very interesting story to follow and see how it plays out.

If you would like some more insight in this situation and a look at some of the information here are a few websites to check out:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2019/02/22/at-t-disney-epic-games-pull-youtube-ads-child-exploitation-concerns-pedophiles/2948825002/

https://www.npr.org/2019/02/22/696949013/advertisers-abandon-youtube-over-concerns-that-pedophiles-lurk-in-comments-secti

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/youtube-pedophile-videos-advertising

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