Major Advertisers Flee YouTube Over Pedophile Comments
While YouTube may be the most popular free online video platform, advertisers are jumping ship and suspending their ads because it has been discovered that pedophiles have been exploiting the platform to exploit videos of children.
In response, YouTube has announced that it has already taken some action to combat the problem and will continue to monitor, investigate, and take further actions, to stop the exploitation of their platform by pedophiles. However, many advertisers are still asking for more to be done before they're willing to come back.
What Happened?
As Ars Technica explained, in short, with a few wrong clicks, YouTube users could find themselves in "a wormhole into a soft-core pedophilia ring on YouTube." The "wormhole" consists of videos of young children in "compromising situations," and user comments link out to other sites and call out specific timestamps of when certain "compromising situations" will appear on the video.
YouTube's response has not only targeted the exploitative users and channels, but additionally, some innocent channels created by parents, or kids themselves, and video game companies too, have discovered several videos no longer qualifying for advertising revenue, or have been removed.
What Should You Do If You YouTube?
If your firm has a YouTube channel, or advertises on YouTube, you might want to just go take a peek at the comments on your videos, and see what videos your ads have been airing alongside of, and checking the comments on those videos as well. If you see suspicious comments with links off the site, or timestamps, you might want to report those comments to YouTube.
If the comments appear to be of the same kind discussed in any of the above links, you should probably consider taking down your videos or ads as well as reporting the conduct.
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