Ad News reported a YouTube spokesperson confirmed, ”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 two million videos and over 50,000 channels masquerading as family-friendly content.”
A raft of global brands have been concerned for months over the placement of ads next to content that is either outright NSFW or capable of attracting predatory comments.
YouTube has moved because they received a crack on the head from their advertisers – not because of any moral compunction on their part. YouTube’s position to date has essentially been to call “too hard”. Too hard to monitor the sheer volume of content being uploaded; too hard to monitor the comments (predatory). However, today the monolith has found religion and discovered it’s not too hard at all.
An Ad News writer noted a simple search for ‘young girl on bed’ pulled up far too many videos containing content that would never be published on a professionally curated media website, while YouTube has told them it unequivocally did not condone or accept content that endangers or sexualises minors but the sheer volume of videos that are uploaded every second and the fact that many of these videos may not be illegal makes such policies very challenging to police.
YouTube is taking five measures to address the problem including:
- tougher enforcement of its community standards
- age-restricting content
- disabling comments, and
- advertising on inappropriate content
YouTube said, “In the last week we terminated over 50 channels and have removed thousands of videos under these guidelines, and we will continue to work quickly to remove more every day.”
