YouTube disabling comments on videos featuring children

HIGHLIGHTS

•  A new approach to stop predators
•  YouTube bans 'harmful or dangerous' prank videos 
•  Cannot comment on videos featuring “young minors”

Recently YouTube has been the centre point of controversy, with videos aimed at children said to include messages encouraging self-harm, and pedophile rings operating in the comments sections of supposedly ‘kid-friendly’ content.

Obviously, this caused a great deal of public backlash, also many high-profile companies pulled their advertisements from the platform, but today YouTube has promised a swing of changes that aim to cure to the problem.

No comment

On YouTube’s Creator Blog in a post, the video streaming service made an announcement that it has already started removing the ability to comment on videos featuring “young minors”, with “tens of millions” of videos already affected.

YouTube stated, “We will continue to identify videos at risk over the next few months. We will be broadening this action to suspend comments on [...] videos featuring older minors that could be at risk of attracting predatory behaviour”.

However some selected creators will still be able to retain comments on their videos, they will have to keep an eye on their comments thoroughly for nefarious comments, and “demonstrate a low risk of predatory behaviour”.

Prevention is better than cure

On top of the manual work YouTube has done in removing “hundreds of millions of comments”, it has also developed a new classifier with a broader scope that helps in automatically detecting and removing twice as many comments that violate policy.

YouTube has declared that it has “terminated certain channels that attempt to endanger children in any way” and will continue to do so as they are discovered, to cap off the post, in part with the help of users flagging posts.