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YouTube bans comments on all videos of children
- mruts 8y agoOr, you know, maybe the kids/parents could turn off the comments themselves?
- bilbo0s 8y agoYT isn't really worried about the kids/parents. They're worried about the Feds in the same way that craigslist was worried about the Feds when they scrapped their "escorts" section. (And the same way that Backpage should have been worried about the Feds when they hosted their "escorts" section.) If the Feds find that pedophilia stuff on your servers, you better have a good lawyer. Which I assume YT does, and just like craigslist, they have concluded that the nuclear option is the one that will keep the maximum number of executives out of federal court. My question is this, is there a better way? Is there a way to prevent these undesirable comments other than just taking comments down for everyone? I understand YT's position. They have to make money, and their executives would just as soon not receive the Backpage treatment. That said, is there a better way?
- mruts 8y agoFair enough. And I know companies need to act in the best interests of their shareholders. But shouldn’t a backpage exist? We need companies to provide services that the government (which is still stuck in the dark) doesn’t approve of: prostitution, drugs, etc.
- circa 8y agoJust ban all the comments. The world would be a better place.
- anonytrary 8y agoThat's the easily solution, but the easy solution is hardly ever the right one. There are plenty of reasons why commenting on videos can be useful. Lectures and other educational content typically have errors and other useful information as the top comments. Those are useful.
- minimaxir 8y agoOfficial statement: https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2019/02/more-updates-on-our-actions-related-to.html https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2019/02/more-updates... It's not "all". > A small number of creators will be able to keep comments enabled on these types of videos. These channels will be required to actively moderate their comments, beyond just using our moderation tools, and demonstrate a low risk of predatory behavior. We will work with them directly and our goal is to grow this number over time as our ability to catch violative comments continues to improve.
- saagarjha 8y agoSurely this group will always be a small fraction of channels creating content that is affected by this rule?
- dragonwriter 8y agoOver time it will probably become a large fraction, as YouTube stabilized rules, increases automation for monitoring the rules, and, frankly as channels that want integrated comments but still can't meet the rules leave YouTube for alternative platforms, or abandon creating the affected kind of content for some other pursuit.
- golemotron 8y agoYouTube steadily moves toward the TV station model.
- trumped 8y agoGoogle has been moving toward that model for a long time... ideally, everyone will be using the get lucky button without typing anything (then they can show you what they feel like)
- MBCook 8y agoHonestly is it so bad if most videos end up turning off comments in the future? I use a blocker to hide comments and don’t seem to miss much. Let people discuss videos on other sites like twitter or reddit.
- saagarjha 8y ago> YouTube told the BBC it would use algorithms to detect which videos contained children. I guess we will have to see how well this works out. I can foresee someone's legitimate video having its comments suddenly removed causing uproar…
- shaki-dora 8y agoVideos with children are just as „legitimate“ as those without.
- tengbretson 8y agoMan this is going to kill Michael Reeves' channel.
- thanatos_dem 8y agoThat child does things that are far too dangerous for not having parental supervision.
- zanny 8y agoThat "child" is 21 this year.
- tclancy 8y agoNah, it's not like corporations weaponized DMCA or anything the last time YouTube went through one of these uproars.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> I can foresee someone's legitimate video having its comments suddenly removed causing uproar… This is targeting legitimate videos, to start with.
- michaelmrose 8y agoMan people are depressing. I'm guessing the scum bags will have to post scummy things on other forums and link to videos. At least the consumers on youtube wont be subjected to such. Incoming new challenges for reddit. Maybe its an opportunity to get rid of some more scummy communities.
- darepublic 8y agoMore depressing that people like you would rather stifle expression so broadly in response to false panics like this one. Thanks.
- thanatos_dem 8y agoA bit irconic that this comment got immediately flagged and deleted... Edit: looks to be back now. Edit edit: gone again
- michaelmrose 8y agoWhen I saw your comment was flagged I vouched for it. For the record I don't consider it a personal attack. My reply was be thus before it was reflagged. Youtube comments are so painfully low quality not to mentioned badly designed as far as interaction that they are nearly 100 useless as it stands. Its a minor loss at best. Reddit is an actually useful discussion forum with a useable model of interaction and sub communities dedicated to particular interests leading to discussions that are somewhat on topic and with people that are at least peripherally interested in the topic. To be clear I think there is room for disagreement within the boundaries of the law and site rules and have no problem with communities existing whom I disagree with. Whats more I'm happy that the code for at least old reddit is open sourced which is why you have at least one complete clone of old reddit with different moderation rules. Even the truly odious can have their own say on their own platform starting at about $75 a year. More if its popular obviously. What I am specifically predicting is that the individuals who are specifically perving out to kids and juveniles will be liable to turn to a platform like reddit because it allows topical, optionally private subforums with a friendly interface where one can share links and comment. I'm specifically calling for individuals like that to be banned from reddit. Let them have their own site until they end up guest starring on to catch a predator.
- jawns 8y agoChris Ulmer, who runs the popular YouTube channel Special Books for Special Kids, said that comments were removed from his channel despite no evidence of unacceptable comments, and YouTube told him that if he turned comments back on, he risked his channel being deleted. [EDIT: Turns out, this is not actually the case. See child comments.] https://twitter.com/chrisulmer/status/1099366622329036801 https://twitter.com/chrisulmer/status/1099366622329036801 "Last night I realized all of the comments on SBSK's YouTube channel were disabled. I saw I could manually turn them back on so I did. Then I read a post by YT saying that by turning comments on I risk our channel being deleted. I love and respect YT but IDK what to do. "The beauty of SBSK is the love and acceptance in the comment section. It shows families and individuals across the world that their [sic] are people who accept them. Many people I interview have been socially isolated. Comments can change their self perception." So it sounds as if YouTube content creators are now in the unenviable position where they need to actively moderate the comments section for videos featuring children, and if they don't do so to YouTube's satisfaction, they could have their entire channel nuked. Even if you're pretty darn sure that your commenters will behave themselves, that doesn't sound like a good deal. Seems like YouTube will need to come up with some sort of "trusted subscriber" designation, and allow content creators to permit comments only from those subscribers, so that any random bad actor can't swoop in and destroy a channel.
- flokie 8y agoLooks like YT wrote back to that post to say that's not true? "...Channels will not get deleted if you re-enable comments--can you send us the post where you saw that?"
- jawns 8y agoAh, thanks for pointing that out! It appears that he saw demonetization and mistook that as deletion. That said, for some channels, demonetization means effectively shutting down the channel.
- dosshell 8y agoLimited Monitization Video that include minors and are at risk of predatory comments may receive limited or no ads (yellow icon). If you think we made a mistake please appeal [link]. We will continue to refine our approach in the coming weeks and months. Is misstaken as deletion? English is not my first language, but I have a hard time reading this as "we may delete your channel".
- twblalock 8y agoSocial media scandals like this one are a reminder that there are larger numbers of closet pedophiles, racists, Nazi sympathizers, and conspiracy theorists in our societies than many people realized. Social media gives them a means to discover each other and collaborate, but they were always there. I agree with Youtube’s move here, but the root cause of the problem is that our societies are worse than we thought they were. Fixing that is going to take more than policing comments on websites.
- deelowe 8y agoDid you look into the scandal? It seemed pretty overblown to me.
- ars 8y agoIt's not quite as bad as it looks, people say and do things online they would never do in real life. Might want to consider requiring permanent irrevocable identities, linked with their real-world identity, for certain forums. By removing anonymity a lot of this type of behavior is suppressed.
- livueta 8y ago> By removing anonymity a lot of this type of behavior is suppressed. Are you sure about that? This sort of thing is difficult to present hard data on, but I feel like arguing for real name policies as a way towards better user behavior is a 2012-era FB talking point that hasn't panned out in practice. I'll admit that literal pedophilia might be a special case, but requiring (and aggressively enforcing) real names on FB and FB-only embedded comment sections hasn't been anything close to a silver bullet. People are surprisingly willing to say some horrifying things under their real identities, especially if those things are considered socially acceptable in their real-life environment. Rather than pseudoanonymity vs verified identities, I think the big differentiator is quality of manual moderation. HN is pseudoanonymous. Wikipedia is pseudoanonymous. Neither is immune from trolls and creeps, but aggressive and consistent moderation is fairly successful in maintaining quality. Of course, YT has scaled to the point where that's not an option. Being forced into this sort of cop-out is a sign that they've grown too big to be able to police user-submitted content in any meaningful way. Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I see abuse and moderateability as, ironically, one of the factors that might push us away from centralized monoliths.
- zaroth 8y agoThe fact that Google is ceding the fight against toxic comments on YouTube is actually pretty shocking. In a company that knows more about you than you can possibly imagine, and more about automated sentiment analysis than anyone in the world, they couldn’t algorithmically determine who should be allowed to post on certain subsets of videos, or devise a system they thought was worth deploying to ensure comments meet a basic level of decency.
- _wmd 8y agoThe ramifications of this are profound, at least: - shake the money stick at them and they will dance (thanks, of all people, Nestle!) - they've admitted a serious problem exists that they were unwilling to deal with until external pressure forced them to (i.e. they can't be trusted to self regulate) - they've all but admitted they can't fix this in reasonable time, if at all This is the first time I can think of where there has been a seriously material chink in Google's.. cultural armour? Turns out the advertisers are in control, and turns out they don't have a technical cure all. It'll be interesting to see how they attempt to reintroduce comments in the long term, no doubt more ML. Of course, this says nothing about a recommendation system that continues to blindly cluster videos of lithe toddlers together. I wonder if any advertisers are making a stink about that Favourite summary: kids are safer on YouTube today because of Disney and Nestle, not because of Google. Let that sink in. The subtext here of course is that Nestle and Disney are some of the most evil companies around, and yet they're the ones that were forced to strong-arm Google. The irony of this defies words, and the reality of the only mechanism at play here to protect children is almost as disturbing - these companies don't "care about children", they were only forced into action to maintain their reputation. (gentle reminder: HN punishes highly commented 'controversial' stories. If you care about this issue being more widely understood, try to limit your commenting)
- theNJR 8y agoI, for one, do not want Google deciding what is true.
- brentonator 8y ago
- ars 8y agoSeems to me requiring the uploader to approve all messages would work just as well without cutting video creators off from their audience.
- redwards510 8y agoYou think giving the attention-seeking 13 year old uploader the ability to approve comments that praise her ability to lick a popsicle is a solution? These kids don't understand what is going on.
- goshx 8y agoTo ban comments is an important step IMHO, but how about putting the people making the comments behind bars? They will keep watching these videos.
- ceejayoz 8y agoThere's no law making creepy comments like these illegal, at least not in the US. (I can't speak for other countries, and US law is what's relevant here.)
- goshx 8y agoThat doesn't mean they can't or shouldn't be investigated.
- saagarjha 8y agoFor what? They haven't done anything illegal.
- goshx 8y agoI just believe there should be no tolerance for pedophiles. If someone is behaving as a sexual predator online, you ought to suspect that's what they actually are.
- lucb1e 8y ago> no tolerance for pedophiles. Note that this is different from: > sexual predator The former is an ill person; the latter a criminal. Your call for no tolerance for anyone with a certain disease, no matter whether they know it's unacceptable and can cope with suppressing it, is a little too broad in my opinion.
- ceejayoz 8y agoI doubt a creepy comment is sufficient probable cause to open an investigation, barring other indicators.
- moonbug 8y agoJust adblock everything but the player element. It's the only way to use YouTube.
- ShhhImAtWork 8y agoI like to use 'Reddit on YouTube' on Firefox, which shows relevant reddit discussion in place of the YouTube comment section.
- Spivak 8y agoImplying that Reddit comments are any less of a cesspool. Reddit hosts a lot of quality discussion from small niche communities but the same is true for YT. If anyone can figure out how to maintain quality discussion at the scale of thousands of speakers they'll be a billionaire overnight.
- Sargos 8y agoWhat a ham fisted reaction to the controversy. Now all content creators have to ensure that no kids are ever in their videos, which includes background footage and movie clips. I think this is a major problem with our current centralized model of the internet where giant corporations make all the rules. Large corporations have no ability to rationally judge situations or inject nuance into discussions. They simply take the easiest and most expedient pathway to make the problem go away regardless of the long term consequences. This is not behavior we want from the few major building blocks of our modern life.
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago> This is not behavior we want from the few major building blocks of our modern life. It's YouTube. It isn't that important. Also, it is their product, so, yeah, they get to make all the rules.
- tfha 8y agoYouTube is incredibly important to the median young person in modern society. It's where probably a quarter of all my own personal STEM knowledge comes from. In high school it might have as much as half. Like it or not, products like YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat have become keystones in the lives of the younger generations.
- l33tbro 8y agoI've never understood this entitled attitude and how content creators feel so compelled to tell Alphabet what to do. Friendly reminder: Alphabet is letting you broadcast unlimited, 4k video, for free, from anywhere in the world, to anywhere in the world. Hell, they'll even let you live-stream now for free. That's fucking insane. Now do they make ad revenue off of it? Sure. But it's negligible in comparison to the value they offer their creators, and they even share part of it with users that play by a set of rules. I do agree with your points about the centralized model of the internet where giant corporations make the rules. It sucks. Then again, I just don't see how you get 24/7, 4k streaming without it being monetised by a centralized corp. TLDR: Alphabet owes you nothing.
- zapdrive 8y agoI wonder how long before they totally disable all comments. I mean I mostly watch all my YouTube on my smart TV, and as far as I know, I can't read any comments on the TV. Additionally, I can't even read the description of the video, or the tags, or even the number of likes/dislikes. So I guess that is the direction YouTube is headed to.
- MBCook 8y agoSame thing if you’re watching on a phone, at least outside the app. I can either watch the video OR read the comments. Guess which one interests me more. Between that and watching on my TV comments barely exist for me anyway.
- notTyler 8y ago1. YT has problem that generates a lot of bad press and loses money/face. 2. YT develops either easily-gameable or far-too-heavy-handed automated solution to said problem, because they can't afford to actually police their content. 3. Passionate creators (that don't get struck down mistakenly) have to jump through ever more hoops, while ad $ flocks back to YT. 4. Repeat steps 1-3. Granted, I don't really see a solution, as their's just straight up too much content and it's ever growing as the barrier for entry is just an internet connection.
- Phenix88be 8y agoI don't know how to feel about this. The concept of "commenting on web page" is old, but with so much people connected to internet, do we really need a comment section on all pages ? From my point of view, comments are most of the time irrelevant, especially on Youtube. HN would be the exception. Comments involves a lots of energy to moderate for no value most of the time. I know it's nice to have feedback when you create something and share it whit the world, but maybe we don't need a comment system to have user feedback !
- squirrelicus 8y agoMy thoughts were along the same lines. Why exactly are comments allowed on YouTube at all? Literally all humans are aware that YouTube comments are a cesspool.
- krapp 8y agoComments, on most sites, are a Skinner box to keep users around and engaged in order to improve channel and ad visbility.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoEngagement, a good comment war will bring people back to that page.
- tux1968 8y agoReally depends on the channel. There are many technical channels that have interesting and useful comments without many problem posts at all.
- MBCook 8y agoYou can get your feedback on Twitter, or your subreddit, or your website. Is it so critical that it’s directly on YouTube? Maybe that extra friction will improve the comments measurably.
- hcnews 8y agoComments and other forms of p2p interaction are generally added to create a community. People don't come back to a site/store/place if they don't get a sense of community. Comments are also generally very hard to moderate by an automated system (as also shown here). I like twitch's model where the channel owner and its moderators are responsible for the kind of community they want in that channel. There are diverse kinds of community on twitch as a result. Youtube could probably incorporate some version of this for smaller-medium channels and it would work better than current cesspool.
- rixrax 8y agoAnd while at it, add a forced moderation for the comments for the rest of the videos where channel owner needs to approve of, and be responsible of for any comments shown on the videos. And Facebook too.
- post_break 8y agoI'd like them to take a look at predatory selling of merchandise to children next.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoYou know they're an advertising company? Unless you're offering ways to improve their predation on consumers I can't imagine they'd care to hear what you have to say.
- post_break 8y agoNo I'm talking about Jake Paul and the likes telling kids they literally won't be cool unless they buy his merch or attend his "events".
- pkaye 8y agoThat is where parents should do their job.
- bduerst 8y agoThat is better handled through legislation - i.e. Sweden's anti-advertising laws for targeting children.
- kgwxd 8y agoAren't we all just children in the eyes of God? :]
- jumpman500 8y agoI think the time is ripe for a YouTube competitor to take chunk of its market share. YouTube has an impossible task of making a video hosting platform for everybody. Kids definitely need a particularly safe space to upload and to have supervision of some sort. Even adults don't necessarily want to be subject to the weirdness of the internet. Others really want a completely free, wild and weird platform. It doesn't make since for one platform to try to cater all these groups.
- theNJR 8y agoMy conclusion, after writing and thinking about this a lot lately, is that the three mega platforms are unwise, but unavoidable, due to network effects. We are going to have to make a concerted effort to somehow fix this. Hyper-niched communities, like Hacker News, work so well because we are united around shared passions and goals. Mega platforms contain many ideologies which are at odds with each other, constantly battling for their truth. Never before in history have competing tribes had to share the same space like this. It doesn't work.
- chillacy 8y agoMaybe an analogy can be drawn from two tribes being integrated into an empire. Usually the empire changes both tribes into its form, but some new gods get added to the pantheon.
- zanny 8y agoFacebook et al go out of their way to silo its users into small cliques of influence. On Youtube if you watch gaming videos you get ads for gaming, get recommended gaming, and aren't going to see ads for makeup or power tools. Any open access community will attract hostile actors seeking to usurp it. The problem with Facebook / Youtube / et al is that these corporations are more interested in trying to find a technical way to automate moderation than to actually moderate and police their platforms to weed out of the bad actors. It isn't something that is inevitable or even made worse by scale, its just these companies are operating to maximize profit, and needing human faces at screens to moderate public comments is a substantial expense.
- forrestthewoods 8y agoYouTube would be better if they banned all comments on all platforms. I use the HerpDerp plugin. It converts all comments to herps and derps. A+++++ would recommend. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/herp-derp-for-youtube/ioomnmgjblnnolpdgdhebainmfbipjoh?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/herp-derp-for-yout...
- theNJR 8y agoWe are in the midst of an ideological battle. Network effects combined with tribal conflict are unleashing something insane. I've been writing a longform article about this since Monday, and it seems like twice a day something new comes out like this. Hard to keep up.
- Wowfunhappy 8y agoI think this should be the original source, instead of the BBC? https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2019/02/more-updates-on-our-actions-related-to.html https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2019/02/more-updates...
- Wowfunhappy 8y agoLegitimate question, does this apply to any video in which a minor appears for even a very brief period? If you're recording an hour-long video podcast, and a child of one of the hosts runs through the room in the background for one second, does that entire video get comments removed?
- zanny 8y agoIt means whatever Google wants it to mean, because they operate Youtube however they want. Almost nothing Google / Youtube / etc do is based on legal mandate or requirement, its all their own arbitrary decisions they think will maximize shareholder revenue / retain advertisers on the platform.
- kabacha 8y agoIt doesn't matter. Youtube videos are a business to some people so anything that has _potential_ to harm revenue will go straight out of the window. "Is it worth to include this kid in my skit if it will reduce the revenue by 10%?" Combine this with 10s of other already existing hypotheticals and you have yourself a neutered vlog machine that is today's youtube.
- Wowfunhappy 8y ago> "Is it worth to include this kid in my skit if it will reduce the revenue by 10%?" Yeah, that answer is easy—it's not worth it. I'm more interested in what happens if it's accidental. You mention vlogs. If a "vlogger" is recording themselves walking down the street, and a kid passes into the frame, what do they do? Do they need to scrap the clip and start over? Do they attempt to edit out the kid? Do you just never record in public anymore? Actually, that last option seems the most practical, but it robs the whole piece of its intimacy. If Youtube elects to take the stricter approach to this, it's going to have unintended consequences that I'm not seeing anyone else talk about right now. I almost wonder if it would be better to remove public commenting entirely.
- kabacha 8y agoMy vlogger example was rather lazy. I'm not really sure how to define the current meta youtube content but "creative" is definitely not a word would be using for majority of it. I mean every youtuber thinks about how to avoid being demotized or just in general reduced profits. I think your point about public filming is very valid as well. Even if the risk that your video will get caught in the filter is <5% it's still not a risk worth taking. I watch a lot of skating videos and un-surprisingly enough they feature kids, sometimes as main subjects but often in the background. Filming at skatepark is suddenly a considerable risk because a falling kid might evoke some sexual conotation in extreme minority. This is a lazy solution that unfortunately just be adapted into the collosal folder of other lazy youtube solutions until this medium loses the last bits of creativity it had.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bilbo0s 8y agoIs this something that can be put on the shoulders of the video uploader? Make it incumbent on the uploader to moderate their comment sections instead of just yanking the comment sections altogether? I understand YT's concern. The Feds find child porn discussions on your website, they're not gonna simply ignore it, any more than they ignored "escorts" on craigslist and backpage. I get that part. But instead of going down this road where you just delete it for everyone, tell people that they are now responsible for the content on their videos. We find these child porn talks on your videos we yank your channel, and report it to the Feds. Simple as that. I don't know? That probably has some drawbacks too, I don't know? I'm just trying to find anything that can be done to protect us, not necessarily from the douchebags, but from the worsening consequences that the douchebags seem to have on everyone else in the community.
- doorbellguy 8y agoYouTube algorithms. How effective are they at this sort of deal?
- rvanmil 8y ago> "better protect children and families" They're not protecting anyone, they're just sweeping the problem under the carpet. The real problem is naive/ignorant/reckless parents allowing kids to upload their stuff for the world to watch.
- girst 8y agowell, they're protecting their revenue stream.
- icebraining 8y agoI'm pretty sure many don't even know; after a certain age, kids can be pretty sneaky if they want. We only had a single home computer, on the living room, yet I still accessed plenty of shit my parents have no idea. And nowadays, there's always those school friends with smartphones...
- Mirioron 8y agoAnd do you consider that you turned out in some particularly bad way?
- icebraining 8y agoWell, certainly not due to anything I might have seen online.
- cmroanirgo 8y agoIt seems to me that yt could've implemented the perfect honey trap for pedos. Make an inappropriate remark on children and (being Google), track you down using a variety of fingerprinting techniques and report you directly to the appropriate authorities of that country. The latter part could probably even be automated. And yet, they've taken this stance: one that puts the onus on the content creators themselves to moderate the comments. Unfortunately, the pedos are still out there, being predators.
- djsumdog 8y agoThey already do this and so does Microsoft. Many companies have shared image finger-prints (hashes of images that can deal with resizing) and special people granted permission by the Dept of Justice to report such images. It's a small number of people, leading to at least one Microsoft employee filing a lawsuit for the PTSD he got having to verify and report illegal images. As far as these YouTube videos, Google does get rid of all content with clear abuse and reports it to the authorities in the US and possibly the origin country. For this particular case, none of these videos have illegal content. Most of them are videos of teens filming themselves. It's others who go through and place them into a creepy context by grouping all of them together in playlists and via comment-chain links. Creating any type of honeypot is most likely unethical and illegal. Just look at what happened to the FBI in the Playpen case.
- Wowfunhappy 8y ago> It's others who go through and place them into a creepy context by grouping all of them together in playlists and via comment-chain links. Wanted to pull this out as (IMO) the most important part of your comment. There's nothing for the police to go after, because nothing illegal was happening here. The videos themselves were 100% benign, and while the comments were creepy and awful, they were also free speech.
- lucb1e 8y agoSo they cannot be censored, sure. But can they not be probable cause for a temporary tap on their internet connection? And if that reveals stuff like https connections to unpopular sites whose content can't be viewed publicly, Tor traffic, maybe torrent traffic, then that might be suspicious enough to bust the door while the connections are going on. I'm against dragnet surveillance and all, but comments that are clearly predatory is a red enough flag that even I start to think it warranted to escalate step by step, and continue depending on what is found in each step. Of course, this entirely depends on whether the comments are "oh look at that sweetie, probably has a nice puss" or just "oh look at that sweetie" interpreted the wrong way. I'm on the second page of HN comments and read three linked articles about it, and nobody mentioned what it's all about other than "predatory comments on videos involving minors". Edit: As expected, Dutch news coverage is more explicit than prudish American. Example comment is: "$time $camel_emoji toe... Then again at $time". Another example: "Hi honey baby where r u from??". Last example is just "Love you" with a bunch of emojis like hearts and presents. Another website mentions the kids were called "godess" or "barbie". This sounds like it would be extraordinarily easy to just build a blacklist of words that trigger new comments to land in a moderation queue (processed either by youtube itself or by the video owner)... not sure what the difficulty is exactly. It seems harder to detect kids in videos than to build a blacklist of these comments, except that the former can be automated and the latter is ongoing moderation (probably too simple for Google: "if you can't automate it, it can never scale, so it can never be a solution").
- aero142 8y agoI watched the original expose video of this and I found the comments be disturbing, but I don't expect any platform to perfectly prevent comments. The more damning part for YouTube was how the recommendation engine was clustering the videos based on pedo preferences and automatically creating little pedo playlists. To me, that is their bigger fault as a platform is that they are built on automatically giving people more of what they like. Even pedos.
- 40acres 8y agoDoes YouTube even need comments? I can't remember any meaningful discussion happening in the comments, it's mostly meme type stuff. Long term I can see this being the final resolution for toxic comments.
- proc0 8y agoYes I read comments a lot in videos I watch. They tend to be more infotainment, so comments are filled with discussions surrounding the videos. Utopias don't exist. It's either we put up with toxicity, or live under a censorhip/dictatorship. Seems those are only two options in the long run.
- defertoreptar 8y agoProbably. Comments provide feedback for content creators, which improves quality. That helps engagement, as so does being able to interact with the content creator and comment in general. That means viewers have a better experience and are likely to spend more time watching ads.
- pgrote 8y agoThe most useful comments I've found on youtube are for home improvement or repair. People chime in with other ideas or better ways of doing things.
- pwython 8y agoExactly, on a lot of technical/tutorial videos you'll see helpful discussion, like people asking questions that weren't covered, pointing out flaws, etc.
- southphillyman 8y agoComments drive return views
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- anonytrary 8y ago
- mrweasel 8y agoHow is it possible that it's easier for YouTube to identify children (people under the age of 18) in videos, compared to identifying certain types of comments and automatically moderate those? Or is it some law regarding censorship that's the issue?
- rossdavidh 8y agoChildren's appearance is not likely to change, in ever more sophisticated ways, so as to still appear like children to humans but not to the algorithm. Thus, while not intrinsically harder than text analysis, it could very easily be the case that it is easier to flag videos as having children (and thus turn off comments) than it is to automatically police comments. Note that they said it won't apply to videos of teenagers; my guess is that this is because it would be more difficult to automatically distinguish between teenagers and young (or just young-looking) adults.
- raldi 8y agoHere's another signal their abuse team could be looking into: On videos where a lot of people are following links to a specific timestamp, grab a couple frames starting at that point and run them through the AI to see if they contain children, and if so, put them on a review queue that's sorted by "popularity".
- gm3dmo 8y agoThey've missed a trick: Make adding a comment only available to subscribers.
- m23khan 8y agoAs a Father of very young kids, I think this is nothing short of emergency. Not only commenting on kids videos should be banned, also youtube should heavily vet and tag all their kids related videos -- these days kids are hooked on watching cartoons and poems on youtube and a lot of times, there are really garbage videos targeting kids just showing little girls buying and playing with make ups, cleaning houses and learning about shopping.
- drak0n1c 8y agoPeople said the same about the chat rooms we used when we were kids. You could argue that those had much more potential than Youtube comments to lead to actual physical harm. In some cases, bad things really happened. Chris Hansen made a show about it, and police used chat rooms to find pedophiles. But were internet chat rooms ever an "emergency"? Where do we draw the line with bans? There are family-friendly content creators who diligently police their comments sections who now have their livelihoods severely impacted.
- Wowfunhappy 8y agoI'm mostly playing Devil's Advocate here, but consider that Youtube is much more widely used than IRC chatrooms ever were.
- hbosch 8y agoIn addition, Coca Cola never ran ads on IRC spliced into channels (as far as I know ;)).
- m23khan 8y agoits not only stereotypical or extreme behavior in kids video which I am talking about, its also about banning videos (and people who make them) which really are harming kids today. Imagine if your kid really enjoys watching crap youtube shows like “Emma Pretend Play”, “Nastya and Baby”, and “Ryan toys review”, what exactly are they telling the kids? That money is meaningless and buy buy buy?
- xenadu02 8y agoGoogle manages to impose the Google Death Penalty on people for supposedly violating AdSense terms or having an unpaid Google Cloud account or any number of other reasons. Is there some reason they can't require a verified account to comment and nuke any account found to be making inappropriate comments? That sure would put a stop to it.
- enturn 8y agoI don't have the stats to back this up but I imagine there would be a significant portion of unsavory comments that appear from people/bots that didn't actually watch a large portion of the video. I think it would work in YouTube's and creator's favor to disable adding a comment until you watch a large portion of the video or you load all the ads.
- RIMR 8y agoAlright, cool. Now all the pedophiles can lurk in secrecy and collect all the recordings and repost them on pedophile websites, and YouTube can pretend it has nothing to do with it because none of the offending comments are under the videos making it abundantly obvious who views these videos.
- danols 8y agoUnsurprising, lazy & coward reaction from Google. That said, not that comments will be missed. Been using the extension "Distraction Free for YouTube" for the last couple of weeks which includes an option to remove all comments on all videos. Plus every other distraction. Been enjoying my YouTube time a lot more since i started using it. Amazingly clean & refreshing experience. Now I am on the hunt for similar extension for other parts of the web.
- cmiles74 8y agoThis doesn't seem to be getting a lot of play, but isn't it important to note that YouTube has been generating ad revenue by serving this content to this audience? It seems like they are only stopping this practice because the amount of revenue that they will lose from Nestle, Disney, etc. exceeds whatever amount of revenue they had been generating by aggregating these videos and serving them to this specific audience. Preventing the aggregation and serving of this class of content seems like the larger problem. It's also not clear to me if the removal of the comments will prevent the aggregation of these videos. My suspicion is that even with the comments removed, these videos will still be grouped together and will still garner the same undesirable audience. I don't see any talk of somehow clearing whatever history Google has collected that has caused them to be clumped together in the sidebar.
- madrox 8y agoEveryone seems to be blaming Google, but can we acknowledge that this wouldn't even be a problem if people weren't jerks? The only reason Google even has to do anything is because people are posting predatory comments.
- mhuffman 8y ago... yet they are still perfectly willing to allow content from children to generate revenue off of them!
- Posibyte 8y agoThis seems like a ham-fisted solution does it not? Channels like ChadTronic play on the nostalgia of being a kid back in the '80s and '90s, yet AFAIK has been unable to enable comments on any of his videos. The weird, funny comments are a big part of the experience in those kinds of videos. Some tropes of the show itself have been built around the comment section. Would it make more sense to instead target the patterns used by predatory commentators rather than shutting down the system completely? This is Google, the company of bringing meaning out of arbitrary data, is it not possible to build social graphs of what people like, scour, and activate these time codes? Couldn't you restrict the features that enforce those patterns? Lastly, does forcing these comments off negatively impact the rankings of these creators? Comments have traditionally played into the engagement of any said video and had an (understood) impact on how a video ranks on release. Are these channels now just permanently stunted in their future growth?
- pgrote 8y ago>Lastly, does forcing these comments off negatively impact the rankings of these creators? Comments have traditionally played into the engagement of any said video and had an (understood) impact on how a video ranks on release. Are these channels now just permanently stunted in their future growth? 1) Yes. 2) Yes. Youtube has taken this action without an overall plan. One of the Youtube creators was told as much in a chat with youtube support. (https://youtu.be/oeI0-ijIotk?t=504 https://youtu.be/oeI0-ijIotk?t=504) They indicated to him that some creators will be negatively impacted until everything is worked out. The program is working just like they planned. lol
- badfrog 8y ago> The program is working just like they planned. Or like they didn't plan
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y agoOr ya know they thought the situation was sufficiently urgent that they needed to do something immediately without thinking through every possible eventuality. Have you never dealt with a PR emergency before? Often, the "let's take two months to game this out" approach is not the most effective way to address the problem.
- balls187 8y agoI wonder why Youtube has this problem, and not say Instagram?
- calbear81 8y agoHere's a crazy idea, why not only let children comment on children videos? This way, kids that want to still express themselves and connect to their peers can do so on YT.
- spookthesunset 8y agoGreat. Tell me a way to determine which accounts are being used by kids in a way that scales to hundreds of millions of active users...
- swayvil 8y agoAh yes, halting conversation for our own good. We see this on reddit all the time. The conversation gets hot so the moderator locks the thread. How does this help anything? I've actually asked. And I never got a straight answer. I figure it's some kind of moderator-loss-of-control-anxiety-reaction.
- hindsightbias 8y agoHave their been any studies on comment quality at free vs subscribed (for money) sites? Perhaps Patreon should just add comments and subscribers can comment there. Content creators could link to it and it would be read-only unless you pay. Most edgelords aren't going to pay to play.
- egypturnash 8y agoPatreon has comments already, fwiw.
- lifeisstillgood 8y agoI am reminded that we are still doing a distributed web all wrong. We don't need comments sections Bear with me for a moment - but PageRank is the start of the problem. It's basically measuring link distance from Stanford University web site - the closer you are the more juice you get. But it assumes that a single domain is a single publisher (and so all articles on a given site should get the same google juice - the same rising tide) But facebook (and many many other sites) lend their domains google juice to all comers - so that if you rationally want greatest reach (ie highest rank in search engine) you publish not on your domain but on facebooks (or medium etc). But this leads to many unintended consequences- the facebook moderation problem being one. it if we see facebook not as a monolith but as firstly a web space provider, then a indexer over that webspace and then a algorithmic feed provider, we see dramatically different ways of dealing with the problem - if we should give people webspace to put their kids pictures and share them (facebooks main use case arguably) then "normally" that space would be under the users own domain. So why not have a more granular pagerank? Why not have google assign juice to facebook.com/paulbrian seperate to juice assigned to facebook.com/paulgraham. Then we see no reason to host the webpages under facebook.com - if I need to "earn" my google juice just as i would on a normal domain it's no benefit I see comments sections in a similar vein - having my comments stored on youtube es pages / domain is just not how it should be - they are my comments so they go on my server / web space and they link up to the video That way google juice tells us which people are worth reading and which are hate filled garbage - based on their reputation. I need to flesh this out some more but we do seem to have gone wrong
- Zelmor 8y agoJust remove children altogether from Youtube and be done with it. Fallout 1 was better without kids (stealing from you in Arroyo), so will Youtube.
- lbacaj 8y agoI’m going to say something that will likely get me downvoted like crazy here on HN, to salvage some karma let me first say that I love the first amendment and free speech. Now, as a parent I am absolutely disgusted that there was recently discovered a YouTube “gang” pushing comments that were promoting pedophilia, in plain sight, tagging comments so algorithms could pick them up and other folks could easily find them. Secondly I am disgusted by the fact that there are videos embedded within Peppa pig videos on YouTube, in the middle, pushing kids to harm themselves and it is impossible to detect them. Google these things they are all real. Look I get it, I’m a parent, I’m responsible for my child so the YouTube app is gone, she will not get access to it until she’s old enough. That still does not make this stuff ok, these are terrible human beings creating this stuff. I applaud YouTube for stepping in but I still won’t install their app anymore, this does not mean it is ok for their platform to become a great place for that sort of stuff no platform should ever serve that. When folks on here comment and say one parents voice outnumbers 100 others, why the hell not if this content is targeted at our kids? Edit: Exhibit A: (This one is apperantly fake news, sorry. I was fooled myself a few days ago.) Exhibit B: https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2 https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...
- Dayshine 8y agoWhy is Exhibit A a hoax that never harmed any children? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47393510 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47393510 I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here.
- lbacaj 8y agoWhile “momo” May be a hoax there are videos with adults in them embedded within these cartoon videos.. that was just the first result I got when I googled, while there may be a ton of fake news these days these mashups I have seen myself .. sorry if I hurt my own point with that first link, but the point is very valid. https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2 https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...
- lovelearning 8y agoI feel this is unfair to content creators and to the subset of viewers who comment decently (which I think is actually the majority of viewers). I know of innocent content creators who have faced this, although their content was not child-oriented and showed their own children for barely 10-15 minutes across their total content time of 500+ videos. Banning comments has consequences such as viewers not being able to express sympathy or appreciation when it might help. As a viewer, comments introduced me to many new channels and concepts and cultures - all that is lost now. This is not the right way IMO.
- ltbarcly3 8y agoThis is just idiotic. Rather than removing videos that creeps are into, or in any way addressing the situation where their platform is being used by creeps, they are just removing the evidence that creeps are there so we won't be able to embarrass them by pointing out the creeps using their platform to be perverted creeps. So the creeps will keep creeping on kids, and nobody will know except Youtube, since they have all the logs. Nobody will be able to screencap an advertisement on a video with some pedophile's comments anymore, so the problem is solved as far as Youtube is concerned.
- jake_the_third 8y agoJust how would you solve this if you were in their position?
- spookthesunset 8y agoYou won’t get an answer. There is no good solution that makes everybody happy. Just like everything else in the world it involves trade offs.
- ltbarcly3 8y agoI would start by closing all the accounts that made creep comments on children's videos, or showed a pattern of viewing videos that are obviously intended for that audience, and banning them from creating other accounts (hard to enforce, but at least they can hold that in their pocket if one of these creeps shows up on their radar again), and then forwarding their information to law enforcement. Lots, or almost all probably, of those accounts can be linked to a real person (either by the username or their IP). If police knock on some doors a lot of these guys are going to be too stupid to lawyer up and will probably confess to much worse things or agree to hand their laptop over for inspection after a couple of questions. Additionally, by a simple analysis of what videos are overwhelmingly viewed by accounts that view other inappropriate videos they could detect and remove almost all the videos that creeps are into. The original video which blew the whistle on this even pointed out that the youtube recommendation algorithm had detected this pattern of behavior, and once the person viewed a couple of these child exploitation videos they were recommended hundreds and hundreds of others.
- GreenToad5 8y agoAre they going to require an ID system so the age of everyone in the entire video can be verified? I guess 2/3 of YT vids will have comments disabled? What about all those super popular channels featuring family vacations? Not even documentaries can have comments? I honestly don't believe that this headline is true, but if it is... Good opportunity for a YT competitor to spring up.
- tanilama 8y agoYoutube comments tend to be cancer anyway. Won't miss them.
- scarejunba 8y agoWhen we were young, we had the Internet and we'd share source code and run our tiny BBSes and then our geocities pages and enjoy sharing. We told each other how when we were older and in charge we'd have such free expression. As 11 year olds we discovered goatse and survived bypassing the 18+ porn warning. We're adults now and we go on all right but we made one big mistake. We let you censorbots take over. Good job. You took this beautiful thing we had and you ruined it. And now you're coming for everything under the guise of taking care of the children. It took so much work to get you guys to leave video games alone and now you're here for everything else. How did we let you do this?
- jennsang 8y agoThis is true, as it doesn't need to be a matter regarding only the creeps. I was thinking sociopolitically, where adults related or not make the decision to use minors as props, whether for a thing as big as ad campaigns or as small as for social brownie points. As a grownup, if someone were to post my image without my express permission I could pull some legality in my favor. Children generally don't have the same resources, lacking their own guardianship. I'm just saying that until they can legally make such decisions for themselves, privacy should be the standard, to save them from embarrassment or abuse. We must all decide for ourselves what to share of ourselves. http://www.samadhantutors.com/ http://www.samadhantutors.com/
- benj111 8y agoI've watched numerous videos on YouTube, complaining about how YouTube treats its creators. How long is it going to be before we get comments turned off on videos (channels?) for no identifiable reason?
- hilbert42 8y agoIf not a good idea then it seems to me to be a very practical one (despite it being censorship). As nowadays no matter how carefully one chooses one's words or how innocent one's thoughts are about such matters, someone somewhere will misconstrue them and take offense. Shame, but that's the way of the world these days.
- yason 8y agoThe march to make the world a safe, sanitised place has so many bumps and slippery slopes on the road that it's hard to gauge whether we're making progress or not. Internet is hard to tame and so is human nature, both in good and bad. The trigger for this was some big companies pulling ads. I suppose that in the context of "predatory and obscene" comments regarding children it's well understandable. The problem with that is what happens next time when the advertisers pull ads because there is something else they don't like? Eventually, it leads down to political correctness and self-censorship as there is always someone who gets offended, and even the possibility of getting kicked out of Youtube or the service losing ad revenue keeps everyone on their toes. Further, disabling comments fails to address another issue: pictures and videos of children freely available on the internet. That cat is out of the bag for good. The technical response would be to have a separate (private or public) paedophile forums where they just link to Youtube videos and make comments on the videos. That's outside of Youtube's business and keeps BigCos from having bad PR but would still matter to any underage person shown on an internet video. So the real enabler to this is the proliferation of user-published content. Especially when people seem to like to share stuff online, inevitably also with strangers, it is even conceptually pretty hard to limit the audience of that sort of material. Fighting that process is like the war on drugs: it will just claim casualties one after another, left and right, whereas nothing really changes. While trying to make things nice and clean for everyone, babies get thrown out with the bath water. Dirt on internet is like a law of nature. There has always been dirt, sometimes more and sometimes less. While paedophilia is the true hot potato nobody really feels comfortable with, the other dirt is a valuable cross-section into the scale on which people are. Bad (Youtube) comments can be so revealing at times, and they really pull you out of your bubble. I don't like the general process of eliminating dirt and trying to set a political correct and business-approved bar for quality because what remains after that is shallow reflections of actual persons and human psyche. I don't know what Youtube should do either. The concept of brand companies disliking that their advertisements are shown next to offensive third-party comments is very much absurd in the first place, so how can you deal with that? I can understand that companies want to whitelist or blacklist specific categories and channels where they want (or don't want) their ads but getting pissed by comments complete unrelated to the advertisements is where things get hard. That's like pulling ads from a magazine because the magazine happened to have pictures of children and a group of molesters happened to sit in a pub making predatory comments of those pictures next to the advertisement. What has previously been unimaginable apparently turns into reality when you do it on the internet.
- miguelmota 8y agoAnother example of a big corporation trying to be the world's parent. Censoring does more harm than good.
- dalbasal 8y agoYoutube comments... Ultimately, YT comments are fairly horrible. Apart from an occasionally decent joke or even more occasional comment from the video's subject, youtube comments are either nasty or banal... with a high % of nasty. Racism, nasty politics, sexual harassment, other kinds of harassment... The median top comment is a troll. Of all the major social media, I can't think of a worse commenting culture. Banning comments on children sounds like a decent decision from "the suits" to curb the most harmful effects but... where are the product people? Surely, someone, at some point, has had ideas for how to improve this travesty of a discussion feature. It's not like you're risking much. Even if changes kill commenting entirely... How could google let this be so terrible for so long?
- oaw-bct-ar-bamf 8y agoIf you think YouTube comments are bad, I recommend you to visit the Twitch (Gaming) stream chats. It will change your perception of 'horrible comments'
- supermatt 8y agothat’s simply not true. it depends entirely on what you are watching. i follow a number of artisan channels (blacksmith, for example) and the comments are overwhelmingly positive, and often helpful.
- sgt 8y agoIt seems YouTube is doing a lot these days to the detriment of creators and vloggers. YouTube is by far the best platform out there for posting videos, but are there any viable alternatives? I think we need another YouTube. Vimeo comes to mind but it's a bit fringe (mostly weird videos), and I'm specifically looking for creator videos. Maybe this is a startup opportunity for an eager HN-er, although I suspect running a video site is insanely expensive.
- shusson 8y agoStupid question: why doesn't reporting and flagging comments work?
- clusmore 8y agoI would love to see a solution for this in the browser. If there was a tag, or some metadata attribute that indicated where each part of the document originally came from, you could just configure your browser to not render parts you don't trust. So in this case, YouTube could just flag the comment section as being provided by other users, and you can choose to block it if you don't trust other users to provide appropriate content. I would love to say that websites would flag ads as coming from a 3rd party ad company, and we could choose to block those too, but of course they wouldn't.
- lucb1e 8y agoOther than the logo on top, the menu, the footer, and your own text in the search bar, what content on YouTube would not be covered by that tag?
- ForHackernews 8y agoHere's hoping YouTube will see the wisdom in just removing the comments feature.
- pysxul 8y agoThis is leading for some to crazy situation: I am following this guy who lived in china and make video about culture shock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeI0-ijIotk&ab_channel=laowhy86 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeI0-ijIotk&ab_channel=laowh... He happened to be married and have children. Youtube disabled all comments on all of his video because like one or two feature his kids ... But 99% of his content doesn't feature them
- mortdeus 8y agoTheres something called a parental control and last i checked they were pretty effective for concerned parents. Google does not need to be in the business of trying to provide parental oversight over creators who just so happen to be minors. Plus dont we want to retain the ability to profile people who are showing a concerning level of indication that they may be somebody who is willing to act on an impulse to commit paedophilia. IMHO i think the best course of action to deal with pedophiles on youtube who think they are protected by the annomity of the internet, is to try and develop a way that makes it possible for authorities to obtain enough solid evidence that enables a federal prosecutor to bring up validatably just charges against youtube users who knowingly attempt to proposition a minor into an act of sex. Also i need explicitly throw out an IANAL disclaimer right now and point out—— !!! I am NOT a lawyer nor a student of law !!!——before I delve into this more. But theoretically speaking I think from a prosecutorial point of view (which again i stress that IANAL) it shouldn't be hard to prove a logically sound legal case that a sexually provactive comment that is targeted at a minor subject in a video's public forum (regardless of how vague, indirect, or seriously intended said comment may or may not be composed) this should all be considered knowingly propositioning a minor.
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- megous 8y agoNow noone will be able to verify for themselves the scale/severity of a comment problem anymore, or learn from it. The evidence is gone. Might have been an interesting thing to dive into for a while, look dispassionately at, think about, and to learn something. But no. All you can get now is some dramatized version of reality from third parties, who can barely distinguish between crime, pedophilia, child abuse, and inapropriate comments online, or be bothered to investigate the problem in any depth. Perhaps it's too soon for that. Meanwhile, outrage won again.
- deadlyst0rm 8y agoThis company has been following a really old-fashioned mentality for solving these kinds of problems! It sounds like they hired a daddy instead of someone who can contribute with creative solutions.
- jackcosgrove 8y agoBack when Facebook came out, everyone thought it was the best business model ever. You provide a framework, and users provide the content. Turns out user-generated content can be bad for business.
- GreenToad5 8y agoIf only they could develop some kind of machine learning AI tech that could make highly suspicious comments require approval. I guess they just aren't sophisticated enough to do that... But I guess they must have AI that can identify kids in videos accurately (even 17 1/2 year olds).
- dangerface 8y agoGood call they should remove them on all videos.
- matz1 8y agoThis the time for someone to make alternative platform that have different policy.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y agoOh yes, I imagine that a video site whose raison d'être is "we allow comments on videos of children" will be a real bastion of high-level discourse.
- matz1 8y agoThey don't have to stated it out blatantly. Beside making other platform, what are other alternative though?
- eumenides1 8y agoAm i on crazy pills, but aren't YouTube comments trash in general? Isn't it better to have the creator link to a discussion page with actual moderation and moderation tools?