YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

[Graham Carter]

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47408969
WTF Google!

Once again its the minority "groups" ruining it for everyone else!
Whats next, facebook banning all commenting on photos / videos of kids?!

Obviously they will be using facial recognition and advanced algorithms to calculate which videos contain minors... however how will this detect videos such as archived footage going back several decades.
For example I upload a video of myself as a child (80's child ) running around on a beach whilst on holiday ... will that commenting be disabled for featuring a child?

Or how about artists like Aled Jones... he has just released music albums of him singing in duet with himself as a child... and I've seen video compilations on youtube of him as a child as well.
Or Michael Jackson singing as a child on youtube... how will the algorithms cope with that!!!!!

 

----------------------------------------

 

 

Granted... there are is a lot of COMMENT guff in the majority of mainstream content so trolls won't be too pleased either!

My problem is the whole blanket ban approach.. this kind of approach never ends well... and it sets a president for other companies

 

I use Facebook for example to share video content of my child with grandparents and family members, some of which live thousands of miles away..

Again my problem with this blanket approach is that other media companies like Facebook will more than likely repeat this approach on their own platforms and all of a sudden can't comment on family stuff!

 

Some further examples...

High Street Bookstores

...here in the UK we have Waterstones... a large retail chain who's primary product is books.
If this blanket ban mentality continues either as a direct decision by the retailers themselves or as a mandate by Government, then in this example, the children sections of these stores which are decorated to attract and please children, suddenly became a no go zone enforced by staff for adults!

The mentality would be that there is a possibility of Peadophiles hanging out in this section of the store, running the risk of attempting to offer the children sweeties and puppy dogs! AKA blanket ban of ALL adults entering the children area of Waterstones bookshops!

Lucozade

This is now a product which has received a blanket ban to children conversely
Because of its high caffeine and sugar content, minors are legally restricted from purchasing this and similar products.
 

Let's say Im out for the count with flu symptons and I need my 11year old child to head to the local shop to buy me some.

Nope, the government have blanket banned minors from purchasing "energy drinks" because of a small amount of incidents where minors have either died or come to severe harm because of these products.

What happened to educating children? Be-it in the home or in school (or both).
Or look at China and the almost complete ban of all but government sanctioned website and internet products.

BLANKET BANS = NANNY STATE PEOPLE!
Why should companies like google or governments forcing them, try and protect the public from harm?
When it comes to children, its education / education / education all the way.

[Graham Carter]

lol  

[Stefan Payne]

Yeah, putting a plaster on a wound inflicted by a saber.

Not great but better than nothing.

 

All that because of some dude who wasn't sucessful on youtube and wants to burn it all down with all on there because he was not sucessful with his shit.

[imreloadin]

inb4 videos with midgets get flagged as children accidentally...

[Bitter]

I mean look how well the Tumblr auto-tagging of content went and continues to go, and twitter with that pokemon too.

[r2724r16]

inb4 YouTube gets banned

 

But seriously, does Google really think any of this will work? How does a computer determine if someone's a kid or not. Lots of grown ups look like kids. Also, do teens count as kids?

 

What about that 27 year old dude on YouTube who hasn't hit puberty? Is he a kid?

[DrMacintosh]

As we know, YouTube does knee jerk reactions and then dials down the reaction. It'd difficult to have nice things when so many people are total sickos. 

[Guest]

37 minutes ago, CUDAcores89 said:

wait how do they know if it's a child?

 

What if it's just Linus because he's really short? 

Poor Kevin Hart. 

[Curufinwe_wins]

People didnt want content with minors to be demonitized, well this is how that happens until a magical perfect system is found that exactly only filters true offensive stuff, and knows jokes and context and all that other crap.

[Arika]

I gonna quote myself

 

Quote

Maybe google is sick of running YouTube so now they are just trying to force people off so they can tell their investors "yeah all the creators just left" instead of "we fucked up and have no idea what we are doing or how to fix it" 

 

[Syntaxvgm]

so what if a kid walks in the background? what if it's something with highschool aged kids? What's the criteria? 

[Bcat00]

Their platform their rule, live with it or move onto something else

[poochyena]

Its really stupid. Children aren't being harmed by pedos being watching or commenting on innocent videos. Youtube is just being reactionary and hurting regular users in response.

[CarlBar]

The worst thing is this isn't going to fix the issue, it's just going to drive it underground. The stuff that was in the comments will move to alternative communication methods whilst the videos will continue to be used for the same purposes, only now it will be way harder to figure out which channels are involved in this.

[PlayStation 2]

YouTube is great at fixing problems by causing more. That's why it's been broken as shit for me recently.

Like when they fucked up being able to get videos to encode in VP9 and Opus just by using the editor.

[imreloadin]

3 hours ago, Geography said:

What about that 27 year old dude on YouTube who hasn't hit puberty? Is he a kid?

I thought Linus was in his 30s?

[Salv8 (sam)]

the USSR  has struck youtube...

[Techstorm970]

5 minutes ago, Salv8 (sam) said:

the USSR  has struck youtube...

[suicidalfranco]

that's their solution?

I would have just banned kids 

[Bensemus]

The only reason YouTube did this is because people stirred up the media and brigades companies who advertised on YouTube. Because of thst YouTube has to do something. Explaining what they were currently doing to combat these issue wouldn’t work. 

 

Youtube is in a lose-lose situation. Either they go aggressive Amme innocent channels get affected or they go gently and guilty people get away with it. Both get them in shit with people.

[strajk-]

Quite honestly it's the best solution they could do nowadays if you consider the sheer size of the network, so having an automated system completely disable comments while having to deal with the occasional false positive.

 

Better than giving pedos a platform, they will still use it, but at least it made it harder for them to consume that kind of content.

[Graham Carter]

3 hours ago, CarlBar said:

The worst thing is this isn't going to fix the issue, it's just going to drive it underground. The stuff that was in the comments will move to alternative communication methods whilst the videos will continue to be used for the same purposes, only now it will be way harder to figure out which channels are involved in this.

Exactly!  Youtube are worried about either receiving fines from regulatory government knee jerk reactions or upsetting their youtube superstars from loosing money!  Also as my original comments, what's next, companies /governments blocking adults from going into toyshops incase there is peedos planning on grooming kids! 

[PlayStation 2]

3 hours ago, imreloadin said:

I thought Linus was in his 30s?

The same could be said for Doug DeMuro, the type of guy who looks like he's in his 40s when he's younger than Linus.

[Graham Carter]

4 hours ago, poochyena said:

Its really stupid. Children aren't being harmed by pedos being watching or commenting on innocent videos. Youtube is just being reactionary and hurting regular users in response.

Also true!

[LAwLz]

Before everyone burns Youtube at the stake, please read up a bit on why this is happening.

 

A few weeks ago, a channel called "MattsWhatItIs" posted a video called:

"Youtube is Facilitating the Sexual Exploitation of Children, and it's Being Monetized (2019)"

In the video, he talks about some channels on Youtube uploaded videos like children in bikinis, and those videos were monetized (just kids playing around, totally family friendly, right?). However, the comment section were filled with people linking to time stamps with more "explicit" things happens, like maybe a child is in some sexual pose or whatever.

 

So as any calm and rational people would do, Matt riled up a brigade of furious people and all of them started contacting advertisers, calling for a boycott of Youtube until the problem was solved. As a result, several major advertisers such as Disney, Nestle and Epic Games pulled all their ads on Youtube.

 

 

And this is Youtube's quick fix to the issue, which they were essentially forced to implement because of the call for boycotting Youtube.

 

 

I don't think people fully understand how massive Youtube is when they say they shouldn't implement widespread and generic policies.

300 hours of video are uploaded to Youtube EVERY MINUTE. On top of that Google gets about 1400 DMCA takedown notices every minute, and failure to comply with even a single one could potentially cost them billions of dollars in fines.

When you have 300 hours of video uploaded every single minute, 24 hours a day, and billions upon billions of viewers (5 billion videos are watched every day, if I recall correctly), there isn't really room for checking every single video and comment for context. It's easy to sit in your chair, look at a single video and go "this one is good, so it should be allowed", but it's hell of a lot harder to analyze 750 days worth of video every hour (yes, over a year worth of video is uploaded to Youtube every single hour).

 

 

And to top it all of, are these changes really that bad? I doubt that every single video featuring even a little bit of a child will get demonetized and comments disabled. My guess is that this filter will work on a more primitive level such as looking for keywords. Doing content analysis on video is not really possible, at least not on the scale of Youtube.

And should those types of videos actually be monetized and have comments enabled to begin with? I saw some vlogging mom on Twitter curse at Youtube because she could no longer monetize her videos of her child playing, or sleeping or whatever it was. Why even have that monetized to begin with!?