🧠 TIL YouTube supports pedophiles

Well, I didn’t actually learn this today or even this month. It’s been abundantly clear for years now that YouTube does not care about pedophiles using its platform. PayMoneyWubby has produced a couple videos exposing the problem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M78rlxEMBxk

In fact, after PayMoneyWubby uploaded his video about kids on Musical.ly, YouTube deleted his video due to sexually explicit content, even though all of his source material came from videos uploaded to YouTube.

Based on YouTube’s actions, it is clear that the company does not care about pedophiles using YouTube to get off to videos which sexualize children. Instead, the company only appears to care about how many people spend time viewing videos. If they took action against the pedophiles on YouTube, it would hurt their numbers and the company does not want that to happen. In fact, this does not need to be assumed. YouTube itself has stated that view counts are the reason they do not take action:

“But YouTube has not put in place the one change that researchers say would prevent this from happening again: turning off its recommendation system on videos of children, though the platform can identify such videos automatically. The company said that because recommendations are the biggest traffic driver, removing them would hurt “creators” who rely on those clicks.”

NY Times

On YouTube’s Digital Playground, an Open Gate for Pedophiles [NY Times]
On YouTube, a network of paedophiles is hiding in plain sight [Wired]
YouTube still can’t stop child predators in its comments [The Verge]

Also, it should be noted that videos which sexualize prepubescent children are not the only questionable content that YouTube supports and defends:

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