Now an even bigger issue has arisen, withreports of child exploitationhappening in the comment sections of videos featuring children. YouTuberMatt Watsonraised the alarm on what he described a “soft-core pedophile ring” that passed messages, links, and contact information to each other in the comments of videos of young girls in particular. Following this revelation, a number of companies pulled their ads from the platform includingDisney and Nestlé.
The response to this controversy on the part of YouTube has been to restrict the appearance of ads on content which could possibly be considered inappropriate. A parentcomplained on Twitterthat innocent videos of her son doing gymnastics had been marked as “Not suitable for most advertisers.” According to a respondingtweetfrom the official YouTube account on Friday, “we’ve taken a number of actions to better protect the YouTube community from content that endangers minors … even if your video is suitable for advertisers, inappropriate comments could result in your video receiving limited or no ads.”
This has lead to a lot of concern among content creators that their videos will be demonetized if they feature children at all. Worse still, creators may find their advertising income slashed because of the behavior of commenters on their videos. The YouTube comments section is famously awful and hard to moderate, and the threat of punishing creators because of commenters is not going down well. In response,YouTube has saidthat they will disable comments on videos of minors, which seems like a better solution, but that they will also continue to limit monetization of such videos as well.
