Alert: YouTube’s Child-Abuse Problem Is Getting Worse

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Following a viral Medium post calling attention to some very disturbing YouTube channels apparently aimed at children, YouTube has pledged its commitment to ensuring that its channels are safe, clean, and family-friendly.

It’s clearly hard to clean up a site to which hundreds of hours of video are uploaded every minute — and there are videos that might be even worse than merely “creepy.”

A recent investigation by The Times indicated that pedophiles have been using the site as some sort of “shop window” to show off abused children and to reach out to other members of the “community.”

A Brazilian paedophile posted a number short videos showing children standing silently, licking their lips or dancing. Another showed a masked child aged about ten saying: “Hey guys I got new underwear.”

All of the videos were emblazoned with the paedophile’s email address.

An undercover reporter then made contact and the man boasted that he had 315 gigabytes of material showing “naked” children.

Another alleged child abuser, who calls himself Horny Pastor, was allowed to create a YouTube channel despite having a username that had been flagged to US and Canadian child-abuse authorities.

The man posted five videos including one called “12 yr old Nancy twerking in grey outfit”.

In his profile section, he even invited viewers to swap explicit content on Telegram, which encrypted chat application.

The mere existence of this kind of content is in itself is very disturbing.

It is basically child exploitation and abuse.

As much as we’d like it to — YouTube cannot solve the horribly complex and depressing problem of online child pornography.

This kind of general outrage, while well-intentioned, masks the actual problem for YouTube: It’s created an environment where disturbed individuals can put up videos like these without any real fear of discovery (or reprisal). 

YouTube has now grown to a scale which makes it almost impossible to adequately moderate, and it’s not clear what the solution is beyond radically reducing the pace of its growth.

Any thoughts on this?