On YouTube’s Digital Playground, an Open Gate for PedophilesSo a user who watches erotic videos might be recommended videos of women who become conspicuously younger, and then women who pose provocatively in children’s clothes. Eventually, some users might be presented with videos of girls as young as 5 or 6 wearing bathing suits, or getting dressed or doing a split.
On its own, each video might be perfectly innocent, a home movie, say, made by a child. Any revealing frames are fleeting and appear accidental. But, grouped together, their shared features become unmistakable.
Asked to take a very simple measure to stop like this, they said a variation of what they usually say:
But YouTube has not put in place the one change that researchers say would prevent this from happening again: turning off its recommendation system on videos of children, though the platform can identify such videos automatically. The company said that because recommendations are the biggest traffic driver, removing them would hurt “creators” who rely on those clicks. It did say it would limit recommendations on videos that it deems as putting children at risk.
Google is an indefensible entity. I hate that I can't avoid them in my professional life.
And YouTube, by showing videos of children alongside more mainstream sexual content, as well as displaying the videos’ high view counts, risked eroding the taboo against pedophilia, psychologists said.
That's what they, along with Twitter and Facebook, have already done with white nationalism.