The 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 n

The 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.