YouTube terminates more than 400 channels over child exploitation controversy

YouTube has come under fire for allowing videos which exploit young children to thrive on the platform and also for the enormous number of predatory comments that are floating on these videos. The video-streaming website has been taking steps to take down such accounts and content. Over the years, YouTube has pulled down paedophilic content in response to the concerns raised by creators, users and advertisers on the platform. [caption id=“attachment_4629131” align=“alignnone” width=“1024”] Representational image.[/caption] The company has now terminated more than 400 channels and has disabled comments on tens of millions of videos. Commentator Philip DeFranco had published a video yesterday evening shedding light on the YouTube controversy to which the YouTube’s creator outreach team responded by detailing the actions taken by the platform.

YouTube stated that “all of us at YouTube are working incredibly hard to root out horrible behaviour on our platform…There is more to be done and we are continuing to grow our team in order to keep people safe.” The company has also been taking up such nasty comments and accounts to law enforcement, which it has to do in compliance with the US federal law. DeFranco in his video noted that this may not be YouTube problem so much as it is the problem of the current online domain. DeFranco says in his video, “Which, again, is why it’s important that instead of saying, ‘YouTube allows this and they’re happy about it’ — because once again that is an insane argument — the best thing we can do is report disgusting monsters as we would anywhere else on the internet.”

**Earlier this week** , Matt Watson, a YouTuber, posted a 20-minute clip on the platform, which details how comments on the video streaming website are being used to identify “soft-core paedophilia rings on YouTube”. The same was also confirmed by a lot of Reddit users. This video too gained widespread attention. Since the videos came out companies such as AT&T, Epic Games, Nestle and Disney have pulled down ads from YouTube and other companies like Grammarly and Peloton have asked YouTube to investigate further as per The Verge. YouTube has been fighting this issue since years now and it has also put down some community guidelines to specifically address the exploitation of children in videos in 2017. Also, it has given advertisers more authority over the placement of ads.