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YouTube to disable comments on videos featuring minors after child safety fears
YouTube on Thursday said it won't allow people to leave comments on some videos that feature minors, as the Google-owned video site deals with a scandal involving what one blogger called a "softcore pedophilia ring."
The company will disable comments on all videos that star "young minors" and "older minors that could be at risk of attracting predatory behavior," YouTube said.
However, the company said it'll keep comments enabled for a small number of creators who are minors. In those cases, the videos will be actively moderated and YouTube will work with the creators directly. Though the company said it's starting with a small group, it eventually wants to open up comments again to more creators.
YouTube said it's also launching software that could automatically detect and remove predatory comments.
YouTube bans comments on all videos of children
Videos of older children and teenagers will typically not have the comments disabled, unless a specific video is likely to attract predatory attention. That could include, for example, a video of a teenager doing gymnastics.
YouTube told the BBC it would use algorithms to detect which videos contained children.
Blog post. Also at TechCrunch and LA Times.
Previously: Inappropriate Comments Could Lead to Video Demonetization on YouTube
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday March 01 2019, @03:59PM
I don't believe it. They only care enough to not actively cause mass rebellions. After all, they are monetizing the content of others, so they need those "others" to keep posting, in order to attract advertisers, etc.. But that's as far as their "care" goes.
Yeah, yeah. I'll believe it when I see it. People have been predicting a mass exodus from Facebook for years too as more and more (and MORE) privacy issues, issues with censorship, issues with feed algorithms, etc., etc. have come up. I have little doubt Facebook will eventually die off, but it's clear that the vast majority of consumers don't care... they keep posting their crap on Facebook to get their little endorphin awards when someone "likes" their post of some random life moment.
Similarly with Youtube: it would take a LOT of high-profile Youtube creators staging a boycott along with massive unrest about the platform in general to trigger a mass exodus from Youtube. I just don't see that happening. And thus Youtube/Google doesn't need to really care about its users, anymore than Microsoft cares about its users when it releases a new version of Windows every couple years that pisses most people off. Or Gmail progressively making the interface worse and more slow every few years seemingly just to piss everyone off. "You don't like it? We don't care."
Users don't matter if you're a dominant platform. And users matter even less if there are ads to be sold.