XPost: rec.arts.tv, sac.politics, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh
XPost: alt.activism.children
Eleven-year-old Allie sways back and forth in purple pajamas,
mumbling softly.
“I feel so dizzy,” says the girl, who runs a tiny YouTube
channel from her bedroom in Florida. She rolls her eyes into her
head and collapses onto the bed behind her, next to a pile of
teddy bears. After lying there motionless for a moment, she pops
back up.
“Um, I wasn’t really sure what else to add, ’cause all that was
requested was to faint while putting my eyes backwards,” she
says to the camera, thanking a user who goes by “Martin” for the
suggestion.
Allie’s channel is full of skits that she has eagerly filmed at
the request of strangers on YouTube. She’s learned that her
audience particularly enjoys watching her pretend to pass out
and hypnotize herself; those kinds of requests come in all the
time. In January, a user known online as “Damien” even scripted
a scene for her, in which she dons a leotard with little pink
flowers and gets abducted, tied up and knocked unconscious.
By contrast, Martin’s channel is empty — save for a few posts in
which he talks about masturbating and his desire to ejaculate on
a woman’s face. Damien’s channel features a series of movie
clips showing young women being beaten and attacked with
chloroform.
For Allie, whose real name is being withheld, the attention is
exciting. (HuffPost was able to reach her parents and inform
them of the situation; they did not agree to an interview.) To
the girl’s great delight, her dizzy-themed videos randomly blow
up sometimes, pulling in thousands of views despite her small
following. She refers to her viewers as “fans” and promises to
film whatever they’d like to see. That often means unwittingly
acting out sexual fetishes for predators, who flock to her
content like flies.
This didn’t happen by accident. YouTube’s automated
recommendation engine propels sexually implicit videos of
children like Allie from obscurity into virality and onto the
screens of pedophiles. Executives at the Google-owned company
are well aware of this: For years, media outlets and vloggers
have been sounding the alarm over YouTube’s aggressive promotion
of videos featuring vulnerable and partially clothed kids. The
New York Times reported last spring on a mother who was
horrified to find that a video of her young daughter playing in
a pool had been watched hundreds of thousands of times.
“YouTube is a company made up of parents and families,” YouTube
assured users and stakeholders in the wake of that story, which
laid out in detail how the platform would serve pedophiles “a
catalog of videos” sexualizing children. “We’ll always do
everything we can to prevent any use of our platform that
attempts to exploit or endanger minors.”
But despite its statements to the contrary, YouTube continues to
actively put children in danger, a HuffPost investigation has
found.
The tech behemoth’s safety measures — such as its pledge to
disable comments on videos prominently featuring minors — are
inconsistently enforced and insufficient. Undeterred, pedophiles
are openly grooming kids and compiling their videos into
sexualized playlists, making girls like Allie easy prey.
What’s worse, YouTube’s algorithm is still plucking videos of
children in potentially sexually suggestive scenarios — bathing,
doing gymnastics, spreading their legs — and lining them up en
masse for users with predatory viewing habits. It’s even pushing
viewers of erotica on the site toward a repository of videos
starring scantily clad minors.
YouTube could easily rein in its amplification of such
problematic content — as it has promised to do time and again in
the face of bad press, sweeping advertiser boycotts and threats
of legislation. Instead, it has rolled out half-measures to
quell the public furor while continuing to facilitate,
incentivize and profit off the sexual exploitation of children.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/youtube-pedophile- paradise_n_5e5d79d1c5b6732f50e6b4db
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