Skip to main content

YouTube pulls ads on 2 million inappropriate children's videos

YouTube pulls ads on 2 million inappropriate children's videos

/

It’s also investigating autocomplete search after suggestions for child exploitation content

Share this story

iPad YouTube

YouTube has removed more than 270 accounts and over 150,000 videos from its platform, and switched off commenting on 625,000 videos targeted by child predators, according to Vice News. Advertising partners including Adidas, Deutsche Bank, Cadbury, and Hewlett-Packard have frozen advertising on the platform after finding their ads were being played alongside abusive content.

YouTube has had problems with child-exploitation material being uploaded onto its platform with videos depicting children in abusive situations gaining millions of views. “Over the past week we removed ads from nearly 2 million videos and over 50,000 channels masquerading as family-friendly content,” YouTube said in a statement to Vice. “Content that endangers children is abhorrent and unacceptable to us.”

This comes shortly after YouTube was found to be autofilling search results with pedophiliac terms; for example, when a user searched something like "how to," the autocomplete generator suggested "have s*x kids" and "have s*x with your kids." The results, first reported by BuzzFeed, were also spotted by some users on the site, but have since been removed and were gone when The Verge tested for it in a private browser.

YouTube says the matter is under investigation. "Earlier today our teams were alerted to this awful autocomplete result and we worked to quickly remove it," the company told BuzzFeed News on Sunday. "We are investigating this matter to determine what was behind the appearance of this autocompletion." BuzzFeed does note a source saying that the asterisk in the autocomplete phrase suggests a potential campaign to populate the site with inappropriate search results.

Google has previously explained in a blog post that predictions are based on popularity and the freshness of search terms. Its search algorithm also filters out offensive, hurtful, or inappropriate queries about people. YouTube said it would block predatory comment sections on videos of minors earlier this month, and said it would crack down on bizarre videos targeting children.