YouTube has a big problem this week, and it’s nothing to do with European copyright reform.
The video service has been under fire for its policies around protecting children who feature in videos on its platform. Why? Because of reports about child predators leaving suggestive (or worse) comments on such videos. Yesterday, YouTube outlined how it’s trying to tackle the problem.
“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 and we will continue to identify videos at risk over the next few months,” explained YouTube.
This is expanding, too: “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 behaviour.” Some channels will be able to keep comments open, but only if they “actively moderate their comments, beyond just using our moderation tools, and demonstrate a low risk of predatory behaviour”.
Amid reports that some big advertisers were suspending their spending on YouTube, it’s no surprise that such swift action has been taken.
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