Disney, Nestle, and Others Are Pulling YouTube Ads Following Child Exploitation Controversy (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Disney is said to have pulled its advertising spending from YouTube, joining other companies including Nestle, after a blogger detailed how comments on Google's video site were being used to facilitate a "soft-core pedophilia ring." Some of the videos involved ran next to ads placed by Disney and Nestle. All Nestle companies in the U.S. have paused advertising on YouTube, a spokeswoman for the company said Wednesday in an email. Video game maker Epic Games and German packaged food giant Dr. August Oetker KG also said they had postponed YouTube spending after their ads were shown to play before the videos. Disney has also withheld its spending.

On Sunday, Matt Watson, a video blogger, posted a 20-minute clip detailing how comments on YouTube were used to identify certain videos in which young girls were in activities that could be construed as sexually suggestive, such as posing in front of a mirror and doing gymnastics. Watson's video demonstrated how, if users clicked on one of the videos, YouTube's algorithms recommended similar ones. By Wednesday, Watson's video had been viewed more than 1.7 million times. Total ad spending on the videos mentioned was less than $8,000 within the last 60 days, and YouTube plans refunds, the spokeswoman said. Two years ago, Verizon, AT&T, Johnson & Johnson and other major companies pulled their ads from YouTube after learning that some of their ads surfaced next to extremist and violent content. Yesterday, YouTube released an updated policy about how it will handle content that "crosses the line" of appropriateness.

"Any content -- including comments -- that endangers minors is abhorrent and we have clear policies prohibiting this on YouTube. We took immediate action by deleting accounts and channels, reporting illegal activity to authorities and disabling violative comments," a spokeswoman for YouTube said in an email.

Comments

Good. Less ads to block

[WCMI92]

I hate ads on Youtube.

As sick as it is..

[scsirob]

.. There will always be sick people imagining things in pictures or videos that are not there. There will always be people that are offended by anything you do or say. When you put out stuff on the internet for the whole world to see, there's no way to *NOT* offend or trigger some idiot somewhere on the planet.

Please return to common sense. If a video shows a girl having fun, it's about the girl having fun. Not about to sicko three doors down who has sick fantasies. Turning to censorship will not change that.

Re:As sick as it is..

[zlives]

can we have a conversation about why people are uploading their kids on the internet in the first place?

Re:As sick as it is..

[Anonymous Coward]

A fully clothed girl doing gymnastics is not porn.

But, pedophiles will watch such a video and experience lust.

The fact that this will happen freaks people out, and a boring run-of-the-mill "look how adorable my kid is" video has suddenly become dirty.

This situation is fueled by emotion, so it is not logical. Emotion has tremendous motivating power, so you can't talk it down with logic.

People will suffer all kinds of injustice under the banner of protecting children. Its a strong instinct. That's why politicians like to play that card at every opportunity.

It is not fair. Too bad. That's the world we live in.

Re:As sick as it is..

[grep -v '.*' *]

why people are uploading their kids on the internet in the first place?

You wouldn't download a car, you wouldn't download a movie. But would you download a kid?

IMAGES. They're uploading IMAGES -- to share. They're also the parental guardians over them, so they have that right. (I think that's a right.) They're presumably doing it to show off to their friends or their kids friends, they don't realize (or don't care) that literally their entire world can watch them as well.

And what's wrong with that? Maybe another dance class instructor will learn a new move or have a new idea (OMG, CULTURAL APPROPRIATION!) Maybe another kid will watch these and decide "I can do that, too!"

Now let's be real -- SOME people are going to watch that and imagine sexual acts. Or bestiality. Or ritual sacrifice. Or beheadings. Or maybe new costume designs or even haircuts. That's true of ANYTHING. (Sheep jokes about NZ. Blond jokes. Rule 42. Someone took an actress's face and glued it on their sex doll.) If you're concerned someone might see something bad in a picture, you (a) shouldn't post it and (b) need to get your head out of the sand. (My mom used to say, "Get your head out of the gutter." Seemingly now-a-days, everyone's head IS the gutter. Not quite sure what happened -- "Sex Sells" or something.)

If we're leading up to talking about banning pictures because they might offend (or attract) someone, then notice that God, Allah, Re, Zeus, Odin, Thor, and FSM appear in EACH and EVERY picture on the internet. They're invisible, so you can't see them, but they're always there. So, let's start banning all pictures everywhere. (Here's a naughty one. But include Muhammad there and heads will literally roll.)

And BTW: if I start fantasizing about AOC, Nancy Pelosi, and Trump, can we ban every picture about ALL of them? I'd like for SOMEthing good to come out of this.

Re:As sick as it is..

[bobbied]

Are you suggesting that a video of a child on YouTube, with no last name and no location (which is less information than the newspaper offered) is a cause for concern?

Perhaps.. It depends on both the context and unknown future events. There is just no way to know for sure.

I think most folks vastly under estimate the amount of data they actually are giving up when they post stuff online. It's hard to understand just how the information will be stored, used and impact people in the future. It may be nothing, or, it may be a huge deal.

I think the young adults who grew up in a culture of oversharing everything, getting your 15 min of fame by going viral, it's tempting to just post stuff. Stuff that will be *really* embarrassing in about 10 years, when your kids find it or when some prospective employer want's you to explain why you posted the video in which you clearly are breaking the law in a big way... "I thought it was funny at the time" may not be enough of an explanation then.

Posting videos/pictures of kids by parents runs along the same lines. What's cute now, may not be all that cute in a few years, and may be very embarrassing if not life altering years down the road. It may also be giving up critical information to people who are out to do harm to kids, perhaps yours. Personally, I'd suggest parents error on the side of caution and refrain from posting stuff about the kids. I'm not saying it's going to happen, I'm just saying I'd avoid the risks because you never really know.

Re:As sick as it is..

[gweihir]

So the problem are the comments, not the videos?

Re:As sick as it is..

[AmiMoJo]

The problem is that they treat YouTube like social media, but it's not really. On Facebook they can post the video and only their friends of the gymnastics group can see and comment on it. Anyone posting inappropriate stuff gets booted out.

YouTube doesn't have that kind of access control. Visibility is either everyone or no-one, comments are either on or off.

To be shortly followed by...

[hymie]

...people complaining about how YouTube pulled the video of their children being adorable.

Re: And there's the opposite side of the coin

[Anonymous Coward]

She's an adult who can make the content she wants and it really doesn't matter why others might like her work. She seems like a fun lady who does fun things and is fun to look at, and that's just fine.

It won't work

[TWX]

From Youtube: "Any content -- including comments -- that endangers minors is abhorrent and we have clear policies prohibiting this on YouTube. We took immediate action by deleting accounts and channels, reporting illegal activity to authorities and disabling violative comments," a spokeswoman for YouTube said in an email.

It won't work. The fundamental problem is that it's expensive to editorialize/police content and advertising. Major television networks employ standards boards, local television stations have station managers and other staff, and even cable networks have to maintain staff to both sell and to police the content of television shows and of ads. These entities have to spend a sizable amount on salary for these censors, and even being limited to airtime that's limited to 1440 minutes in a 24-hour period they still get it wrong.

There are claims that 5 billion videos are watched daily on Youtube, and more than 400,000 hours of content is added to Youtube every day. There's simply no way to keep up as censors with that kind of content. Hell, Google can't even keep its ad delivery networks free from malicious ads, how do they expect to keep inappropriate content off when those uploading content don't have a strong financial tie with a particular salesman or censor?

Re:It won't work

[Aristos Mazer]

Assign every content uploader to be the personal censor for a random other uploader. And then pick a third random uploader to be the metamoderator for the first censor. Shuffle every week. You can't upload if you haven't caught up on your backlog of reviewing and rejecting or approving whoever you're assigned to. Make the random assignments balanced -- people who upload lots of stuff are assigned other people who upload lots of stuff.

Re:It won't work

[mark-t]

You can't upload if you haven't caught up on your backlog of reviewing and rejecting or approving whoever you're assigned to.

What happens if you approve stuff that the metamoderator disagrees with? Do you also get blocked from uploading?

Bear in mind that your suggested system is simply self-reinforcing, and does not generally allow for the insertion of new or potentially even controversial information, even if there is an otherwise objectively legitimate reason for it.

Sounds like a slippery slope situation.

[fahrbot-bot]

Matt Watson, a video blogger, posted a 20-minute clip detailing how comments on YouTube were used to identify certain videos in which young girls were in activities that could be construed as sexually suggestive, such as posing in front of a mirror and doing gymnastics.

Just about *any* activity can be sexually suggestively to someone, somewhere. Not judging, just sayin' ...

Re:Sounds like a slippery slope situation.

[DontBeAMoran]

Tell me about it! Who came out with the perverse idea of a four slots toaster?!

Re:Sounds like a slippery slope situation.

[Luckyo]

In this case though, the behaviour is often overtly suggestive and is literally the point of the video, down to it being mentioned in the click bait video name. One comedy youtuber I occasionally watch openly mocked one channel that did this to an extreme degree quite a while ago. Literally girl in early teens in outfits highlighted in the video clickbait topic as "making her boyfriend jealous" doing a rather awkward attempt at acting like a porn star right before sex scene starts. Then making out with her boyfriend on camera for a few seconds.

Extremely cringy stuff, the kind I can understand early teens experiment with their sexuality and without parental control doing. Now I don't really care if that's what they do amongst themselves, as I'm not a puritan, but "what the fuck are their parents doing" wouldn't get out of my head specifically because this was on youtube. Putting that stuff on public display at that age is likely going to haunt all of the participants for a long while. Any ad revenue gained is unlikely to be worth it in a long run.

I'm very much in disagreement that this is something that youtube needs to manage though, unless those actions are specifically illegal. This is more of a "social workers, shouldn't you take a closer look at this particular family?" kind of a case in my view, as problems here are likely of a kind that will not go away just because these folks get banned off youtube.

'Soft core'

[philmarcracken]

Does 'soft core' acts actually pose any serious mental damage to the children? Are these acts volitional?

Re:'Soft core'

[Jarwulf]

Scrolling through the video it looks like this 'softcore child porn' is mostly videos often recorded by the girls themselves dancing and or wearing swimsuits. So basically every parent who has recorded beach day and anyone who has walked down a beach and looked at people is now to be considered a child molester. This is where we're at as a society today and everybody is too terrified to speak out against this.

Re: Who says what's suggestive?

[edris90]

Get in trouble is not about right and wrong. It's about whether someone with the capability and the well perceives you to be in the way of what they want. if so they're identify something about you that they can exploit to create a dialogue where you are an evil.

Re: Good. Less ads to block

[Locke2005]

Comic Sans, obviously... it's the only thing that font is really appropriate for!

Read the fucking article

[Orgasmatron]

Or rather, watch the damn video before commenting. This is probably among the 10 worst summaries I've read on this site, and I've been here just about every day since nearly the beginning.

This isn't a problem about parents uploading videos of their kids, or of kids uploading their own videos. It isn't about the videos at all.

The problem is that there is a side of youtube that most of us would never find on our own. But if you know it is there, you can get to it with one search and two clicks, and shown in the video.

Most of the videos there have been downloaded from other users and re-uploaded under a different account so that the parents and kids have no idea this is happening. The comments on the re-uploaded videos are full of creepy comments and timestamps to suggestive moments, or to other videos.

Once down the rabbit hole, all of the recommended video links are to other videos of the same type with the same disgusting comments and links.

Nestle "kills babies" for profit

[quenda]

So Nestle is making a fuss over videos of kids eating lollipops?

Nestle, the company who knowingly killed how many thousands of babies, pushing baby formulae in third world counties?
And have made billions stunting the development of millions of babies by promoting the same products to mothers who were capable of breast feeding?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:And there's the opposite side of the coin

[amicusNYCL]

Why does it matter? Serious question.

In addition to dictating what people are allowed to watch, are you suggesting also trying to dictate why they should be watching it?

Re:And there's the opposite side of the coin

[hoofie]

Look the first time you watch some of her videos, let be honest it's quite easy on the eye.....

After a few of them you really don't notice that aspect anymore as the content she presents is too interesting - you are a true geek if you can do that.

She has been shamefully treated though and comes across as quite a lovely person.

Alex Jones

[bill_mcgonigle]

I'm just sitting here laughing because, as crazy as that bastard is, YouTube proudly deplatformed Alex Jones who is constantly railing against child sex-trafficking rings.

And all the while it turned out that YouTube was the one promoting such things with its technology and/or lack of care.

Not that I'm expecting one single moment of introspection from YouTube.

Re:Alex Jones

[AmiMoJo]

Alex Jones railing against child sex-trafficking is the very definition of virtue signalling. He doesn't really care, he just does it to have something that makes his detractors look bad. "YouTube bans child sex-trafficking activist" sounds bad, until you realize that Alex Jones has been harassing the victims of Sandy Hook for years, and that's not even the worst of it.

Re: And there's the opposite side of the coin

[AmiMoJo]

She is also an accomplished engineer. She has a great deal of skill when it comes to 3D modelling and printing/CNC, particularly an ability to conceive of a product and turn it into something workable quickly.

She has done a lot of China too, especially promoting open source. She is responsible for the first three open source hardware products out of China. She went to the manufacturer of some 3D printers, convinced them to open source the design, helped them do it and meet all the requirements, and got it certified. Gave them a nice sales boost too as westerners love open source hardware. She also helped take some of the stigma off Chinese products, demonstrating that they can be good quality and that the manufacturer can engage with the western world.

There is also the Sinobit, a single board computer for learning. She does a lot to help kids learn about engineering. The design is a little bit like the British Microbit board, but with a larger LED display because the British one is too small to display Chinese characters. Again, open source.

I'm amazed that she kept going after western journalists from Vice nearly destroyed her. They put her in real danger - I won't get into it because that would just be compounding the problem, but suffice to say many people would have gone into hiding after that.

Re: And there's the opposite side of the coin

[Luckyo]

I have no problems with holding puritanical opinions on human body. I only have problems with pushing such ideas on people who aren't in any close relationship to one holding such ideas.