YouTube is disabling all comments on videos of young children

Haven’t there been studies showing that real-name posting doesn’t actually make much of a difference in the end?

They tried, with Google Plus. That just made more people angry.

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Maybe their intent included trying to eliminate anonymous flaming, but the way they approached it read as more personal data collection and profiteering. They don’t seem to do any of this particularly well, do they?

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Yeah, CBC decided to require real names on comments. Now the comments are basically entirely just political shit talking, no matter what the topic of the article is.

The problem for channel owners is that the they want views regardless of whether those views come from the inside of a dumpster fire. Comments drive views from people who want to comment. To make it on the internet you’ve got to pander, pander, pander.

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Re: Requiring real names - if the shit I’ve seen on FB or Twitter is any indication, that isn’t really won’t solve much.

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Well, you could not post every g-d piece of content people upload WITHOUT humans looking at it; the fast flow isn’t the problem, it’s the fact it’s a sewer. If too many peopel are posting too much stuff to YouTube, that’s not an argument against human moderation; it’s an argument to make it harder to upload just any garbage to YouTube.

oh, come on.

or, you know, you could pay for them. Or acquire them through the library. Or find them elsewhere. YouTube isn’t the only game in town, but it is the biggest, hence its status as a virtual monopoly. Ending YouTube would not be the end of video on the web. It might be the end of too much video on the web.

Well, the people who provide universal knowledge would like to be paid for doing so; the fact YOU LIKE THAT SOMETHING IS FREE is not, alas, a compelling economic argument to make it free, or for it to remain free. Also, 'just because I watch things on youTube doesn’t mean I support their business model" - uh, you watching things is the business model.

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This is definitely true, and sites that have tried it (Facebook) have run into huge problems with it, such as trans* people being forced to use their deadname. And it’d be useless for YouTube, where so many members are businesses, bands, or operating under an artist or performer name.

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I don’t categorize YouTube as liberal; it, like many other things, is the product of a liberal society. But much as liberal societies never come out of freedom of religion, while freedom of religion comes out of liberal secular societies, YouTube is a product of modern liberal thought that would not and does not lead to modern liberal thought.

Ridiculous response. They can’t handle it, so they kill it. Plus, isn’t there some value in the comments in that it exposes people and may actually aid law enforcement? Or does the potential harm outweigh that value?

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“Machine learning.”

Right. That’ll work, just like it did for Verizon and Tumblr.

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Actually, people have posted videos of police brutality or others being attacked because of their race or sexually.

If you’re forced to always be completely identifiable to the public for posting a video or making pubic commentary on something you’ve watched, this will have a chilling effect on who gets to participate.

I’m not saying YouTube doesn’t have the right to demand this of its participants. It’s their sandbox, their rules. I’m just saying it doesn’t solve the problem of driving trollies, and in fact, I believe it makes it worse because now the bullies will get to know where you live.

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Another unsung problem with real names is that with a real name and an approximate location, anyone can find out all of your contact information. That seems like a very, very bad idea.

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Also, how many comments did the old system remove? If it was half of them, then the new one removes all of them. If it was 10, then 20 isn’t that helpful really.

Doing that still won’t fix this particular problem. The pedos will just gather on some unmoderated free forum somewhere and share links and comments there. At least actually on YouTube they aren’t hidden, for both good and bad.

My question goes back to, what kind of parent wants videos of their children – in any stage of “undress” – to be available on an open social sharing platform?

My answer keeps circling around back to “the bad kind”. But maybe I’m being too harsh.

It seems like more and more parents are hoping their kids “find an audience” and start raking in that YouTube money. Eesh.

ETA I have the same issue with child beauty pageants. They just feel incredibly creepy and wrong. No matter how you try to spin it, to me it comes down to tarting up a toddler in the hopes of getting money. Fricking weird. It’s your child, not your cash cow.

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It doesn’t take much for some creepy people to sexualize someone, i don’t necessarily think its fair to say that parents that share pics of their kids are doing something wrong. However i’m inherently a cautious person and i’ve generally avoided over-sharing even pictures of myself, if i had kids i probably would do the same thing for them.

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Are you aware that this very news story exists as today’s big deal because a prominent YouTuber publicized it, on YouTube, a couple of weeks ago?

Are you aware that the New York Times, publisher of The Pentagon Papers, has a YouTube channel? As does the Washington Post, CNN, CNBC, etc.

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You can’t really stop people from leering. I suppose fair point that with the comments, you could tell the creeps, but that doesn’t really stop them either.

From what I saw in the videos reporting on this, it isn’t really an issue of undress. I mean, I am sure you have seen adults fully dressed and still found them attractive.

Though young kids shouldn’t be on the internet for several reasons, at least not unmoderated, with the proliferation of tablets and phones kids posting stuff themselves with the parents unaware is a thing. And then it doesn’t help that some parents know about it and don’t care. And to be fair, some of the stuff may be posted by the parent and is something like video from a play or dance recital practice or sports event or even just them goofing off with their kid.

I am sure some of that is the case, but most of the examples I saw didn’t seem to present themselves as that. It was just people doing stuff and posting. I mean a lot of youtube is just that. Goofing off and posting stuff with no real expectation of fame or money.

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The only good thing about people doing it in the open is that we can do something about it. If we decide not to do something about it because it’s good that it’s in the open, then it isn’t good that it is in the open.

Drive them to the shadows, then smoke them out of the shadows to ever darker shadows.

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Fair enough. I allowed that I might be too harsh in my judgement.

That said, if my underaged child (or even I) posted a video to YouTube and it started accumulating these kinds of comments, I would take it down post haste. I would also bring it to the attention of YouTube in the hopes of somehow getting them to focus their shortsighted gaze on a possible problem, and maybe get some accounts suspended.

But my first impulse would be to protect my child.

Yeah, that was my point as to why disabling comments, on just vids of kids or sitewide, won’t fix the problem. It just shoves it back in the dark. The leering will continue, and might organize again elsewhere outside of YouTube’s “zone of control” at which point they can wipe their hands and say, “Not our problem.”

There is no quick/easy solution to this problem.

This is like pulling out weeds, and leaving the roots.

I feel the first step toward any solution requires engaged parents who are aware of what their kids are up to; same as always with every problem that has involved children and teens. It many cases it’s the parents who have allowed the kids to have the devices that enable them to be on the internet in the first place.

I’m not saying to not do something about it. I’m saying turning off comments is a bandaid on a shattered leg. It barely treats a symptom, and does nothing to address the underlying problem.

Okay, turning off comments on videos of kids (as determined how, exactly without messing with false positives?) drives them into the shadows, and those shadows take the shape of some other corner of the vast internet where they regroup and continue to perv and link to videos in their little pervy community. Someplace that YouTube has zero control over.

Who will then smoke them into ever darker shadows? YouTube won’t.

The vids of kids are still getting perved on, only now that they are once removed from the platform, the people the vids belong to are unaware.

What YouTube can do, while this dirty ball is in their court, is to start building files on the people/accounts leaving the comments. Some (most?) probably VPN in and would have no problem shedding an account and starting over with a new one. Others are stupid and locatable.

Algorithms and robotic monitoring is not going to solve the problem either.

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Human pre-moderation is a pipe dream. Reports put 876,000 hours of content uploaded to Youtube per day. As much money as Google has, it cannot afford 87,600 moderators looking at content for ten hours a day. That would nearly double their workforce. And the amount of content there is only growing.

IMHO, they need to prioritize automatic detection, but I think they’re going about this the wrong way. Block commenters, and detect people who repost videos verbatim from other channels (one of the ways that users manage to go undetected is reposting unlisted copies of these videos).

Surely the comments themselves can help identify problem users and videos.

AI detection even for copyright is terrible currently, as many articles here have pointed out. Unfortunately, at the scale of YT, there’s little alternative. IMHO They need to invest dollars and hours there to make the system more robust.

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Your daily reminder that YouTube is the internet for illiterate people. Not just people who don’t know what letters are (although plenty of those in the third world, see those horrid lynch mob stories out of India, etc.), but people whose reading comprehension ends at about five words in sequence.

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Yeah, and they also have Newspapers, so they don’t really need the YouTube channel, do they?