On February 17, YouTube user MattsWhatItIs uploaded a twenty-minute video that exposes the terrible truth about YouTube and social media in general
In the video, Matt reveals research with images and video data that confirms the existence of a pedophilia network within YouTube, in which they share videos of children.
The video, to this moment, has 2 million visits. It’s a sad moment for social media proven by the disappointment and anger Matt shows in the last minutes of the video.
The worst users of the web are outed.
Matt’s video, which is already in the hands of some important news media networks, tells us how they do it.
First, they find a normal video of a young girl (often it’s a girl, but it’s not discarded that there could be boys too) doing everyday things like gymnastics, dance or simply telling us about their daily life. Pedophiles then timestamp this videos in the comments with the moments that might contain the minor in a vulnerable position.
The videos are uploaded by the kids themselves since they are casual interactions of innocent minors. Then, if a lot of these people like it, someone downloads the video and reuploads it to a fake account for all the group to have an archive.
Also, Matt realized that when you watch these videos, YouTube’s recommendation algorithm makes it so that’s the only thing that appears for you on its homepage, which helps these people find more videos with minors in them.
Finally, and what angers the users the most, is that many of the reuploaded videos are monetized. In other words, YouTube is making money off of this terrible and disturbing practice.
YouTube is not the only platform with these kinds of abusive users, though.
Recently, a mother in the UK had to intervene in a Fortnite campaign after hearing her son being groomed by a predator. The woman claims that a man was asking for nude photos of her 12-year-old son, in exchange of money.
She also explains that the boy wasn’t sure how the man got in contact with him, because all of his friends have weird usernames.
Now the kid can’t and doesn’t want to go back to the game, which was an important way of connecting with his friends from school.
An investigation by The Mirror claims that the rates of assault cases on Twitter and Facebook have jumped from 219 to 614 since 2019, of which half of them have to do with children under 16.
Every day there are more and more new users on social networks and there’s no way to know for sure who they are or what they are doing here, even worse, social media has yet to come up with a real way to control who is who on their platforms.
Culpability or accountability?
This information is not to alarm the people or create panic. Nor its purposed to point fingers at social media. Social networks and the Internet, in general, are just tools used by people. The responsibility is on their hands.
Having said that, it most become a joint effort between both parents and social platforms to take this problem out from its roots to avoid any more cases.
No one is crossing their arms. Companies like Disney, Nestlé and McDonald’s are pausing their ads on the platform over this. Also, YouTube reported been working tirelessly to suspend these accounts and block all comments from millions of videos.
Also, many countries have implemented police practices undercover to catch these users. However, there will always be a chance that they could find other ways to do this again.
YouTube had already worked on its algorithm to avoid predators back in 2017, after the first scandal they suffered related to this.
Meanwhile, the first line of defense is the parents. We can’t stress enough the fact that every social network has an age restriction that prohibits minors, which can be reinforced by parents.
It’s also recommended that, during online video game sessions, parents should stay close enough to listen to what’s going on and the interactions minors have with other users.
sources:
www.YouTube.com
www.TheMirror.com
www.theguardian.com
www.uniladl.co.uk