YouTube Takes Action Against Questionable YouTube Kids Videos
YouTube has been under fire over issues with questionable children’s videos that would show up on the main site and YouTube site. Many of these videos while seeming innocent at first and use familiar children’s TV show, comic book, movie and TV characters, turn sour eventually with themes of sex, violence, drugs, suicide, pain, child exploitation and other lewd acts and topics. These videos would take advantage of the YouTube algorithm to get the video to rank high in search and recommendation. YouTube said they were working on removing these videos from YouTube Kids and search. There have deleted many of the videos, and entire channels they found were promoting and uploading this type of content.
But the process wasn’t fast enough as advertiser removed their ads entirely from YouTube and Google’s ad network after pedophiles were making targeted lewd comments on some of these videos. YouTube stepped their game up and took even more extensive action announcing today that they removed over 150,000 videos that had predatory remarks and disabled comments for over 6250,00 clips.
From YouTube:
“In the past week, we’ve tightened up and strengthened the enforcement of our policies to terminate the accounts of users making predatory comments on videos featuring minors. As a result, we terminated hundreds of accounts and removed over 150,000 videos from our platform. We also turned off comments on over 625,000 videos targeted by child predators. Finally, we removed ads from nearly 2 million videos and over 50,000 channels masquerading as family-friendly content.”
While it is good to see action has been taking it seems that YouTube doesn’t push heavy until large advertisers decided to pull their ads. While Google and YouTube feel that they can resolve most issues on YouTube with algorithms and AI, there really needs to be a human interaction of some kind until these automated systems are smart enough to be able to handle these issues.
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