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Tuesday, November 28, 2017
In a statement to Vice News, YouTube says it has removed over 150,000 videos involving child abuse from its own platform. Moreover, 270 accounts have been terminated. On 625,000 videos, the comment function has been turned off. From another 2 million videos and 50,000 channels, the ads have been removed.
The deleted videos, which had been ostensibly created by adults, and were aimed mainly at a young audience, showed children being exploited in abusive and very distressing situations, such as forced feeding and pulling out clothes. One channel featured a video in which a child was seen being shoved into a washing machine. The videos got millions of views and attracted pedophilic comments. The scandal became publicly known last week, when some thousands of videos, mainly from Eastern Europe, were discovered and made public by BuzzFeed News. As a result of the scandal, YouTube has become subject to widespread and heavy criticism. Some renowned companies have paused their advertisements on the site, such as Adidas, Mars and Hewlett-Packard.
“Finally, over the past week we removed ads from nearly 2 million videos and over 50,000 channels masquerading as family-friendly content. Content that endangers children is abhorrent and unacceptable to us”, the company says. In a blog post, YouTube acknowledged last week the increasing presence on its site of this sort of seemingly family-friendly content, and promised to toughen its approach aimed at the protection of kids and families.