There’s a large number of videos on YouTube available to literary everyone, featuring the likes of children, mostly girls under the age of 13, practising gymnastics, yoga, eating ice cream, stretching at the doctor’s exam and similar activities. The content of the videos themselves is nothing that breaks a certain content restriction, but there is another problem to it, according to vlogger Matt Watson, as he explained and showed in his video.
Underneath the videos, users can find a rather hideous exchange of inappropriate sexual and predatory comments, as well as time stamps of the video that lead to the exact moments in which the girls are in compromising positions (widespread legs, their underwear showing, eating ice cream).
According to Watson, whose video has been seen by almost 3 million people at this particular moment, it’s enough to click on just a few of these videos to get into what Watson calls a wormhole where all the content YouTube recommends will keep directing you to the same type of videos, with the same types of paedophiles lurking in the comments section.
To make things worse, with some of these videos, YouTube published paid promotional materials, of the likes of Nestle, Disney, and Dr. Oetker, as well as Epic Games (publisher of the hugely popular Fortnite), Bloomberg writes.
Nestle told the BBC that the food giant decided to freeze its advertising on YouTube worldwide while investigating the case.
In addition to stopping advertising for their products, Epic Games has sent a letter to Google, the owner of YouTube, asking to state what steps will be taken to eliminate this type of content from their platform.
“Any content, including comments, that endangers minors is abhorrent and we have clear policies prohibiting this on YouTube. We took immediate action by deleting accounts and channels, reporting illegal activity to authorities and disabling violative comments,” a spokeswoman for YouTube said in an email.
According to the spokeswoman, total ad spending on the controversial video content mentioned was less than $8.000 in the last 60 days, and YouTube plans to refund that budget to the advertisers.
This is not the first time this platform has been under fire for similar scandals. Two years ago, several major advertisers pulled spending from YouTube, including Procter & Gamble, Marks & Spencer, Audi, and even some British public sector agencies, after ads surfaced next to extremist and violent content.
YouTube has also faced criticism in 2017 for hosting inappropriate videos meant for kids, but according to the vlogger Matt Watson, the situation is now far worse, as the mentioned wormhole engulfs the user very fast, even if they use a brand new account, that has no ties with sexually exploiting content.
The majority of revenue for Alphabet Inc., the company that owns both YouTube and Google, comes from advertising. Last year they earned nearly $137 billion, a rise of 23% compared to the previous period.
