A YouTube content creator has found what he calls a “wormhole” that, within as few as five clicks, could lead to a “soft-core pedophilia ring” where pedophiles are connecting with each other in the comments sections of innocuous videos featuring children.
That content creator is Matt Watson, also known as MattsWhatItIs, who posted a video of his finds on Sunday.
As of Thursday afternoon, the video had been viewed more than two million times.
In it is a collection of clips, many of them innocent, that show kids doing things like gymnastics, stretching, playing Twister, or simply hanging out with friends – nothing that would get the videos blocked by content filters.
Other videos show flashes of exposed genitals, or feature children – most of them girls – doing the splits or lifting up their tops to show their nipples.
According to Wired, some of the children appear to be as young as five. Many of the videos have been seen by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of viewers, and they have hundreds of comments.
Those content streams are filled with lechery: for example, a timestamp on one comment about “she’ll make a great mother some day” jumps to a picture of a child’s bare legs.
Other remarks praise the children, jump to points in the video that picture children’s legs or buttocks, ask whether they’re wearing underwear, or simply insert strings of sexually suggestive emojis.
Watson found that child oglers are sharing their social media contact details in the comments. Most disturbing of all are the links to actual child abuse imagery he uncovered.
Watson criticized YouTube for monetizing these videos: he called out major brands, including McDonald’s, Lysol, Disney, Reese’s, Dodge Ram, and Maybelline, among many others.
Kiss those ad dollars goodbye
Many of the advertisers identified in Watson’s video and in Wired’s subsequent report – among them Epic Games and GNC – said they’ve suspended advertising on YouTube.
Bloomberg News on Wednesday reported that the Walt Disney Company has also pulled its ads, as has Nestle SA.
Chi Hea Cho, a spokeswoman for YouTube’s parent company, Google, told the New York Times that the pedophiles’ comments and actions are “abhorrent.”
Any content – including comments – that endangers minors is abhorrent and we have clear policies prohibiting this on YouTube. There’s more to be done, and we continue to work to improve and catch abuse more quickly.
She said that the company took “immediate action” by deleting over 400 YouTube channels because of comments that they’d left on videos.
YouTube also disabled comments on tens of millions of videos featuring minors, removed thousands of inappropriate comments on videos with young people in them, and reported illegal comments to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
An old problem
As Watson noted in his video, this is a problem that YouTube has been battling for years.
Back in 2017, YouTube got in trouble for monetizing disturbing videos meant for kids, such as a Claymation Spiderman urinating on Elsa of Frozen and a cartoon showing Mickey Mouse lying in the street in a pool of blood as Minnie Mouse looks on.
At the time, YouTube said that it used a combination of automated systems and human flagging to block inappropriate comments – be they predatory or sexual – on videos featuring minors.
But it would do more, it said, such as “turn[ing] off all comments on videos of minors where we see these types of comments.”
At YouTube’s scale, is this even fixable?
Given the size and reach of YouTube, the question that inevitably arises when it comes to the long-running saga of trying to find and filter inappropriate content on YouTube is, “Can this ever be fixed?”
One solution is to do away with comments altogether – and if YouTube were to do so, it would find itself in good company.
Other sites that have pulled the plug include Vice, Popular Science, Recode, Mic, The Week, Reuters, The Verge, and USA Today.
Goodbye and good riddance, Vice said back at the end of 2016, when it killed a comments section that it said had turned into:
…racist, misogynistic maelstroms where the loudest, most offensive, and stupidest opinions get pushed to the top and the more reasoned responses drowned out in the noise.
Watson’s video shows that YouTube’s comments section, when it comes to giving child predators a forum in which they can indulge their predilections, goes beyond vile and into the realm of dangerous.
Readers, your thoughts: is it time for YouTube to turn off comments? Is there anything there worth saving?
roleary
Yes, there is value in Youtube comments.
View the video “8 burger gadgets put to the test” by CrazyRussianHacker then count the number of people criticizing his lack of attention to food safety. He literally takes burgers off the grill using a spatula contaminated with raw meat.
I’d say preventing food poisoning is a good use of video comments.
David Stan
Such problem users are not limited to YouTube as they infect just about every single site that allows users to contribute and comment.
Anonymous
So you’re asking us to comment if comments are a good thing? :) There are a lot of channels where the creator wants interaction with his/her/its audience, and comments are quite valuable there. Maybe they should be “disabled by default”, so the creator has to manually enable comments for each video where they’re desired. They could also be disabled after a certain time limit has been reached, so you could comment for a week, and that’s it.
Paul Ducklin
Good point about commenting on not commenting :-)
To be fair, though, our traffic is a little bit more modest than YouTube’s! We are able to moderate all comments before they go live, rather than letting anyone post anything and then relying on spotting (or being told about) the really bad ones later, after the damage is done.
As we say in the article, *at YouTube’s scale*, is this fixable?
For a really insightful comment on this issue of scale, you might like what Mark Stockley said in a recent Naked Security podcast when we were talking about how big/fragmented/diverse the Android ecosystem had become. (Mark’s comment is the first part of the podcast – at 7’00” if you want to fast forward.)
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/02/13/ep-019-android-holes-ios-screengrabbing-and-usb-poo-podcast/
JJT
How about you point out the obvious? You missed the opportunity entirely in your piece. You moderate -everything-.
Paolo
at youtube’s scale? I don’t think moderating all comments is possible
Em
Several of the family vloggers I watch have started having all of their comments approved. It’s a lot more work for the creators, who already have a lot more to do in producing their content than meets the eye but, if you are posting videos of children, I think you just have to start there until we see what YouTube will do to moderate this kind of thing more robustly.
PWayne
The saddest commentary here is the apparent surrender to the predilections of awful people. Granted, it’s not up to these sites to stop the heinous abuse of children, but that’s the real problem, isn’t it?
Mahhn
I strongly hope they archived and didn’t delete the comments and videos, so that the FBI can hunt the bad people down.
Removing the comments is wrong, not just because it breaks a main use of youtube, but – hell, let the pervs out themselves (remove from public view once discovered). Often that’s the only way bad people are detected – by making comments that out themselves, for all sorts of crimes and plotting of such. Even Krebs finds most of most of the people he does, from researching older post/comments/emails the criminals made.
Anonymous
It’s Google, I have no doubt that they have an archive somewhere! Hate to say it this website alone has made me a little more paranoid about the big FAANG companies. You just don’t know what data they are sucking in and retaining.
Bryan
> You just don’t know what data they are sucking in and retaining.
All of it.
David Bradbury
Its a choice between removing the comments or only allowing accounts to be created / comments left by people who can verify who they really are and publicly display their real name. The worrying thing is this is on a public platform and the pervs who do this are obviously too stupid to know how to cover their horrible tracks using TOR (a whole new discussion about internet freedom there)
Gabriel Clifton
They could always leave an option for the person that uploads: Is this a video of a minor? If yes you must approve anyone allowed to comment, if no then comments are free to post. But this could be even more dangerous in that any pedo could upload his own videos of children and he would be the only one that sees the comments. Turning off comments altogether could be bad though. Look at all the pages that demonstrate products, comments ask about certain things. How to videos, where are they going to ask for clarity about a step and so forth. With YouTube live streaming, sometimes that is how someone can watch their grandchild perform in a concert or event when they can’t make it. How would they cheer them on, write them a letter and send it in the mail?
Jason S
“…racist, misogynistic maelstroms where the loudest, most offensive, and stupidest opinions get pushed to the top and the more reasoned responses drowned out in the noise”
Doesn’t this describe all social media? When all the algorithms favor comments that get a lot of responses, this is what happens.
CanHasDIY
Easiest solution IMO – stop pandering to kids for the sake of the almighty dollar. COPPA should be enforced and probably expanded, profits be damned.
Anonymous
Youtube blocks real news and pushes mainstream fake news even to the point of paying fake news to make more fake news for youtube. I don’t see them fixing this.
Barry
1. Alphabet is the undisputed leader in AI/ML. I’m sure YouTube has billions of comments to feed into a model. If a clever team of devs put 0.001% the effort into #AlphaGoGetPervs they put Google Search, this would be a non-issue.
2. No video involving a child in any way should ever be monitized. It was bad enough that I was barraged with sugar-bomb cereal ads every Sunday morning growing up. But who’s the twisted joker trying to make money off of children’s dance recitals and athletic events?
Jeff
1) I agree with this, but they won’t put the effort/time in because there’s no monetary incentive to do so…
2) I disagree with not being able to monetize a child/minor’s channel/page/videos. There are numerous legit reasons to do so, Think budding inventor showing their wares/ideas and collaborating with commenters… Or young scientists showing how to videos or other experiments online using the funds to advance their educations and video content/materials. Or young artists (musicians, singers, actors, etc) wanting to put their creations out there and make some money/be discovered… to shut all of them down would also be unfair.
dominickpastore
No monetary incentive? It sounds to me like they just got their monetary incentive and started acting on it. They had several major advertisers leave and already started disabling comments sections.
Google is far from their “Don’t be evil” days, but I think this is one case where we shouldn’t be too quick to blame them. It’s easy to say, “Google should have done something sooner!” but if it took this long for someone in ALL of the Internet to find this, how was Google supposed to? It reminds me of that saying, “Make something idiot-proof and the world builds a better idiot.” I’m sure that applies to nefarious users, too, especially when you are YouTube’s size.
And second, Alphabet may be the king of AI, but that doesn’t give them a magic solution to everything. AI is notoriously inefficient (I should know, I am working on my PhD in computer science). It needs mountains of training data. Meaning, in order to find videos with kids in them, they need a huge list of videos with kids in them, for example. Otherwise, they’ll have too many false positive and negatives. As an example, see the demonetization debacle that’s been going on the last couple years now.
Kasun
Actually, it may be possible to do the moderation in YouTube scale. Not only YouTube, but Facebook also put ads to videos. But there is strict control there. In Google, anyone can make an account in 2 mins and do whatever bad things. But on Facebook, it is very hard to make a fake identity today where NEW fake accounts get a ban in one day. However, these strict policies might hurt Activist communities if implemented on YouTube (E.g. LGBT+ people who want to stay anonymous and share their voice). After YouTube realized they are in mud, they banned almost all videos has contains CP which stands for Child Pornography. However many Pokemon Go content creators channels also got banned, because CP is Combat Power in Pokemon Go and same for Club Penguins. While YouTube was busy removing the Thumbs Down button, the YouTube platform was exploited by sick child molesters. It was a disaster which was not inevitable.
Leonard Johan Van Schoor
There is a very simple solution to this. No internet anonymity is the key. You have to register using 2 forms of picture identification and you don’t get to comment until you are verified. You are not anonymous when saying something in public and can be locked up and or sued for harassing or abusing people in public and I don’t see why this should be any different online. Should have happened almost 2 decades ago in my opinion and very long overdue. I have no idea why this has not been done yet. Absurd if you ask me!
Linus Wenell
That’s a double-edged sword, when mentally ill people can find out where you live and come and hurt you and your family if they don’t like what you comment.
Anonymous
Firstly, no-one asked you.
Secondly, there are many, many reasons people may want to be anonymous. Some just don’t want their online and offline identities linked. It’s like keeping your work and personal lives separate. Some people deal with sensitive material. Some people may literally be at risk of harm if their real identity was revealed. And yes, some people are little more than disgusting trolls. But to ban anonymity altogether is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Regardless, Facebook has shown the real name policy is not effective in stopping offensive garbage being posted. And YouTube did flirt with real identities previously via Google+… and again, the garbage kept flowing.
Paul Ducklin
To be fair, the answer to “who asked you?” is that the article asked for comments – and the OP gave one.
ReaderA
Identification is easy to fake and steal. There are 20 million illegal aliens in the US, many who work and live under stolen identification documents or shared with their legal friends. Facebook requires real names, but their securities filings make clear they know half their accounts are fake or unverifiable.
Gabriel Clifton
Not to mention more registered voters with proper identification that live in the voting precinct.
The One The Only (@tlise72)
People can choose whether to have comments on or not. Mine are enabled to be approved before publishing. I also had a post with time stamps on it. I hadn’t a clue why they did it on mine, but it was only a game video anyway with no people in. I just cannot see why people cannot stop finding new ways to be perverts although I wonder if its safe having children on youtube anyway.
Alatar
I suspect YouTube will turn off comments by default unless the content creator agrees to moderate posts. Creators are the only party in the system that care enough to review them.
Shiny
Vile trolls will always find a forum to spout off on. I have a YouTube channel where I talk about vinyl records. Some love what I do, some hate it and hate the bands I talk about so leave rude comments. I leave positive and negative comments up unless it’s really bad or spam. Sometimes I get comments from people that worked in the record industry or knows the artist, so they leave comments where I may actually learn something. So would I think doing away with comments as a blanket ban be good? No!. The worst trolls will carry on until comments get removed entirely, then they’ll move on to something else and get that banned or removed, and move on etc etc, until normal web users have nothing left.
Things we often hear is over sexualisation of children, obesity and their greed for products. Then on a video showing children mainly for children they had a Mabyline advert. Then on the video it’s stated it had adverts for Maybeline, McDonalds and such. Perhaps the companies advertising could grown some morals and ethics and not advertise to children. The first things Youtube, Facebook et al could do is go back to being ‘social’, not advertising space. Next the posters of these videos need to realise there are vile commenters out there and have some sense about what they post. The websites other than better filters could add a Remove/Report button by each comment for content creators to remove unwanted stuff quickly and easily. So should comments be disabled across the board? No!. Content creators lose out on interaction with their audience due to a minority that can’t make civil remarks.Those people should be removed, not the whole functionality for every user that uses it for the purposes it was meant for.
Abdul Jabar
I don’t think that YouTube should disable the comments under the kids video.I think they should allow the pedos to make comments that way so the FEDS/FBI/COPS can use computer savvy people that work for them to track down their IP address which will lead to the location where they were using the device ; find them and arrest these sick humans.
Martin Karl
Throughout the Internet targeted portal spammers are forced to shut down commentary functions or discussion forums to close. This is an attack on freedom of expression that has been observable everywhere on the internet for at least 15 years.
Kimberly Mcdonald
Comments are an important part of the creator/viewer realatioship on YouTube. It’s how we connect with the creators, give feedback and feel that they really care about the people viewing their content. I see this as an end to YouTube as we know it. I personally want the option to comment and to view others comments. Viewers also meet others in the comment section and become a community. YouTube should focus on better blocks for bad comments rather than creating YouTube Red and the other paid for options they now have. I doubt they are shutting those down.
Im
Sorry but I don’t need the government nor a corporation to be my nanny. I don’t need to be “protected” from any comments. I’m a grown adult who can determine for myself if something is raunchy, distasteful, immoral, whatever, and if it is, I will click off the page if and when I want to. There’s plenty of completely inapropriate content ON EVERYDAY CABLE TV airing in the middle of the day (possibly viewed by young children) that is very disturbing to me (extremely violent scenes, foul language, etc) yet no one seems to care about that, yet people think WORDS need to be banned???! Pedophiles are disgusting criminals that need to be arrested, but to ban all comments is just ridiculous.