“When we learned of this issue, we were — and still are — absolutely horrified and reached out to YouTube to rectify this immediately,” Senka Hadzimuratovic, a spokeswoman for the online grammar tool Grammarly, said in an email. “We have a strict policy against advertising alongside harmful or offensive content and would never knowingly associate ourselves with channels like this. It goes against everything our company stands for.”
In response to the latest concerns, Mrs. Cho said, YouTube disabled comments on tens of millions of videos featuring minors and removed thousands of inappropriate comments on videos with young people in them. She said YouTube had also terminated over 400 YouTube channels for comments that they left on videos and reported illegal comments to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
YouTube has struggled to police children’s content. In late 2017, The New York Times found that disturbing content was showing up in YouTube’s children’s app, which is meant for users under 13. Videos depicted the deaths of beloved cartoon characters and real children in distressing situations.
There have been earlier reports of pedophiles cruising YouTube for videos of minors and leaving lewd or sexual comments. In response, YouTube said in 2017 that it would do more to “protect families” on its platform, pledging to remove videos that endanger children and block inappropriate comments on content featuring minors.
“There are some real questions at this point on whether YouTube is just too big to provide a safe place for children,” said Josh Golin, executive director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.
“If you can’t keep pedophiles from trading information in your comment sections of your videos then you shouldn’t have comment sections of your videos,” Mr. Golin said. “It’s a legitimate question to ask — what are the value of YouTube comments, besides to Google’s bottom line, that’s worth the horribleness that occurs there?”
While YouTube has said it deletes hundreds of millions of comments every quarter that violate its guidelines, the lewd remarks on otherwise innocent videos were not flagged.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/technology/youtube-pedophiles.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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