A child is not able to make the connection on how something like eating a popsicle could be anything but an innocent thing to do (I am using this example because it is something that pedophiles like to make children do on youtube according to the video that @TobinL linked in the first comment). There is nothing inherently creepy about it.
An adult can do the same thing, even in a suggestive way, and it is completely ok, because they understand the concepts in play.
You just can’t apply the same standards to children and adults.
Seeing disgusting shit like this really hammers home the message how thoroughly I need to educate my child about the dangers of the internet and social media. Goddamn, who lets their children upload all these videos?
Youtube has absoluteley no credit with me. Normally I’d think this to be a witch hunt and would say google should get the benefit of the doubt in the case of comments by their users. And they do have moderation tools with which you can report inappropriate comments. For any other firm than google I would think this to be enough .
But google is too insidious to get the benefit of the doubt imho. They actually do have a responsibility to save the world from the google created filter-bubble, for instance. The guy in the movie says he can get to the offensive comment from a fresh YT account. But your account is obviously not the only thing google uses to apply the filter bubble. I myself never log in to a google account. I wipe cookies and localstorage every time the browser exits for all but a few sites. And still the Youtube Filter Bubble is in full swing. I look up a movie about engine maintenance and in the ‘related/recommended’ videos in the sidebar are 3 movies by my favourite (rather obscure) musicians. I’m quite sure there’s no actual link between the music and engine maintenance except my previous viewing habits. I don’t know where YT stores it, serverside maybe? But the filter bubble is inescapable.
When you try to reach google on any subject, including this one, you never get any reply. The questions just get dropped. When you do something mysteriously violating their tos your account gets closed with no appeal possible and no explanation of what exactly you violated. (Have happened this to me twice, once an account with nature timelapse movies I made myself, without sound so the music wasn’t the problem, and again with some not-public movies of my children building stuff with lego I uploaded for the grandparents. In both occasions I received a mail that I’d violated the ToS, that the account was closed, that the decision was final and that no communication about it was possible. )
I watch a LOT of YouTube. Since I don’t have a TV it is how I get Colbert, Seth Meyers, et al. I hear that it is rife with ads. I wouldn’t know as I block them.
Depending on the age of the kid of course. I remember when I was about 10/11 years old there was a phone-sex number you could call. As a male you had to pay, but as a female it was free. We (neighborhood kids, ranging 9-12 girls and boys mixed) thought it was the funniest thing ever and of course always pretended to be a girl (easy to do if you’re an eleven year old boy). Of course we knew what was going on. We did competitions how fast you could get the other side panting.
Now can you trust 11 year olds to decide for themselves if this is a good idea? That’s a very different question As an adult looking back I think it might not have been the best idea. At the time we thought it was hilarious. we would try to get someone all riled up and then yell ‘pervert!’ into the phone and hang up.
I get the impression that people, for the most part, just dislike pedophiles vastly more:
Even among people who agree that relentless ogling and harassment is unacceptable (and it’s a smaller percentage than one would like) generally aren’t too concerned about the mere fact that someone, somewhere may be being titillated by media involving women.
Children, though, you can get real support(if not necessarily past first amendment concerns) for the idea that things like fictional writings and drawings(not even at the level of photoshopped stuff derived from actual children at some point) are abhorrent and Something Ought to be Done about people associated with such.
The tl;dr, I think, is that acceptance of the moral conviction that pedophiles(in the sense of people with that sexual interest, not just the child rapists) are bad is substantially more decisive than the moral conviction that harassment and harm to people is bad; and we are seeing responses that reflect this. The metric isn’t harm, actual or expected; but moral status.
(In particular; while both pedophiles and harassers have strong proponents, often perpetrators, and strong opponents; harassers have vastly more nominally-moderates who will to cover for them.
Announce a pedo hunt and pretty much the only pushback you’ll get from anyone who isn’t NAMBLA is a dry request from the civil libertarians to remember the first amendment and during process and some concerns about criminalizing teen couples.
Crack down on sexual harassment, though, and it’s an instant firestorm about the feminazi PC commisars and their grim liberal agenda.)
Aside from “the same people who would, and do, volunteer their children for beauty pageants and reality TV”; I suspect that the answer is often “nobody”.
Tech these days is pretty drool-proof; and generally ships with, um, “user engagement oriented” defaults and/or mandatory features. You have to be fairly young to need parental assistance for some oversharing.
I suspect that the same ‘user friendly; but in a hostile way’ factor probably helps explain some of the parental uploads as well: how do non-nerds share files too large to attach to email after all? And how many of them know how to nail down the access control, if the platform even offers that feature in a form that isn’t badly broken or overtly deceptive?
I may be wrong, but I have the feeling that this youtuber suddenly became aware of the problem when he realised that monetizing of youtube channels was at play.
…which makes me think. Had I a youtube channel, I would write a little script to post comments looking like timecodes on my competitors’ channels. Seems like an easy way to make competition go away.
In practice, the western world has a consensus that sexual interest towards underage humans = pedophilia = very bad thing, while there is no such vast consensus towards other abusive behavior. In other words, youporn gets away with movies where the actresses are dressed as schoolgirls, simply by stating that they are 18 years and a day old.
Real pedophiles are of course nothing like a trolley writing time codes in youtube comments. I know, because one of my uncles is a convicted pedophile.
Until yesterday, if I were tasked to locate some child pornography, I don’t know how I could do it. No idea where the shit comes from. You can’t just search Google (right? please say no). I guess I could drop in random forums, “Hey y’all who’s got the kiddie videos help a guy out,” and be met with ban after ban until eventually getting lucky.
But I found out by watching the MattsWhatItIs video that you only need to show the slightest interest in children to get pulled right into the deep links like a damn vortex.
Youtube makes it unequivocally worse.
Locating pornography of any kind is just about finding the right keywords in google… and MattsWhatis video did not teach you how to find child porn, but how to find videos showing children doing pretty normal things, like play or sports. That difference is important: it is not child pornography, even when someone marks it as titillating.
The video may say so, but I doubt it. It is comparatively easy to scrub comments from such links. I am not going to seek and click on comments to find out, though.
One clarification. My comment about an already existing problem is the one that would still exist after disabling comments on Youtube altogether. The already existing problem is that bad actors could still build forums and link to videos. I was only talking about that specifically.
That isn’t the only thing that is being discussed here. Timestamps of compromising positions, gross comments and porn links can also be found in videos with women in them.
I think in terms of what is accepted on a digital platform, you absolutely can.
True, but I want to make a distinction here- it’s not just people being titillated. That’s not what I am talking about. I am referring to the harassment, prurience and general creepiness that occurs in otherwise ordinary videos comnent sections.
This is sort what I was getting at. I am trying to get people to consider where their responses are coming from and why they make those distinctions, albeit somewhat unsuccessfully.
True.
Nailed it. And that sucks.
Yep, totally true, and as I wrote above, I think that’s the interesting part of this discussion.
Would you be willing to elaborate on this? Isn’t it possible that more than one sort exists?
Historically, it also helped that you had to write down your crazy rant, and then go through the effort (and cost) of mailing it to the newspaper. This obviously did not stop the racists and the loons and the rest, but it meant there was a genuine barrier of entry, and the process took enough time to discourage many, and let others come back to their senses.
What does “of any kind” mean? Who becomes the arbiter of what’s offensive? The current topic is offensive in my opinion, so I agree there. But bad reviews may be offensive to AT&T. Where does that rabbit hole end?
I also agree that one step could be to eliminate publicly viewable comments on YouTube. Allow people to message the creator, and they can either look at it or not, but that’s it. YouTube comments are historically a cesspit of fuckery anyhow. No huge loss in many cases. If a content creator wanted to engage in discussions with fans, they could always set up their own free forum outside of YouTube and link to it from the video. And they could then police their own discussions.
But that is only one tiny piece of this shit pie. As long as the videos are there to be viewed, and creeps are willing to share links to them, and there’s an internet of options where they can gather and comment, not even counting the YouTube comments, it will be done.
Both my daughters are adults, but when they were kids I never let them post videos of themselves on YouTube or other social media. It just didn’t seem prudent; but it also wasn’t as easy to do as it is now.
If your sample size is one, I don’t think you can accurately say “all pedophiles match this one”. At best you can say that your uncle didn’t do this. And there could be any number of reasons for that, up to and including he didn’t think of it, or innocent videos didn’t do it for him.
So cencership?
Thats not the best of solutions in my opinion.
What does this evolve to in 5 to 10 years?
There is no easy solution but what we dont need is a knee jerk one.
It is certainly possible that more than one sort exists. What I had in mind was that real pedophiles seek contacts with their victims. That takes large amounts of time and they do not have much left to spend on youtube.
As an adult looking back I think it might not have been the best idea. At the time we thought it was hilarious. we would try to get someone all riled up and then yell ‘pervert!’ into the phone and hang up.
