Advertisers pulled out of YouTube over reports suggesting a pedophile ring was active on YouTube. Since then YouTube has removed over 400 channels and disabled accounts on tens of millions of videos (via Engadget).
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YouTube Pedophile Ring
It started when YouTuber Mark Watson published a video showing how comments on certain videos were used to enable a “soft core pedophilia ring.”
Commenters flagged videos where underage girls performed certain actions like gymnastics, and were shown in compromising positions. Then, YouTube’s recommendation algorithms started suggesting similar videos. Mr. Watson said he could access these videos in less than ten minutes, starting from completely innocent videos.
Philip DeFranco tweeted a comment showing that YouTube removed these videos and channels, and reported the predatory comments to law enforcement. YouTube found that these videos had monetized US$8,000 in advertising, which would be refunded.
Is this not a case where Google’s tracking is a good thing? I’ll bet there are a LOT of sickos worried to death about their IP addresses being on all those sites analytics pages…….