• YouTube Is A Pedophile's Paradise

    From Rudee@21:1/5 to All on Sat Mar 21 00:03:38 2020
    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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