YouTube removes 150,000 disturbing videos of kids

After facing backlash from the public and advertisers, YouTube has cracked down on accounts that have been making videos featuring children in disturbing and exploitative situations. 

There are various videos seen across YouTube where disturbing and exploitative content is published that is aimed at and stars children in disturbing conditions. These videos are gaining lot of views and in order to stop this, YouTube has started removing hundreds and thousands of videos, BuzzFeed reported.

YouTube revealed that in past week, it ‘terminated over 270 accounts and removed over 150,000 videos from the platform along with turning off comments on more than 625,000 videos targeted by child protesters’. Age-restricting video policies have also been created for videos that contain kid-friendly characters dealing with mature themes or adult humor.

YouTube to restrict disturbing videos featuring cartoon characters

Loads of videos were discovered that contained disturbing and vulnerable content featuring minors, many of which came from ‘verified’ channels. Some of the videos were not even caught up by the ‘YouTube Kids’ filter. However, as soon as these videos were noticed, they were removed.

YouTube’s parent company, Google, has already taken many steps to deal with the issue through targeting disturbing videos and it plans on going further to help eradicate the problem. Their official blog post reported that the company plans on making its approach more strong by setting community guidelines quickly and more strict than before.

“Finally, we removed ads from nearly two million videos and over 50,000 channels masquerading as family-friendly content,” YouTube said.

It would remove ads from the disturbing videos and block any kind of inappropriate comments on videos that star children. Along with that, the company also said that it would provide the creators of the family-friendly videos with guidance while talking to experts about contents that cannot be decided through a simple decision, reported Engadget. Google’s Johanna Wright informed that these alterations ‘will take shape over the weeks and months ahead as we work to tackle this evolving challenge’.

Since June, Google has terminated ads from over three million videos that went against the updated rules regarding ads present in videos containing family entertainment characters that engage in ‘violent, offensive or otherwise inappropriate behavior’ (even if it’s for humor or satire). Companies including Adidas, Mars and Hewlett-Packard have paused ads on YouTube too. Google plans to further strengthen its policies and take a powerful stance against such content.