YouTube Will Now Disable Comments On Videos With Minors

With YouTube being such an open platform, moderating it can be difficult and as such it is usually left to the channel owners to moderate their own channels and comments. Unfortunately not all creators have the time to do so, which unfortunately has led to some very inappropriate comments being left behind on videos featuring minors.

YouTube has since announced that they will be taking drastic steps to prevent such comments from surfacing by disabling all comments on videos that might feature a minor. “Over the past week, we disabled comments from tens of millions of videos that could be subject to predatory behavior. These efforts are focused on videos featuring young minors and we will continue to identify videos at risk over the next few months. Over the next few months, we will be broadening this action to suspend comments on videos featuring young minors and videos featuring older minors that could be at risk of attracting predatory behavior.”

YouTube notes that a small number of creators will still be able to keep their comments enabled, but will be required to actively moderate their comments beyond YouTube’s own moderation tools, and also demonstrate a “low risk of predatory behavior”. More recently YouTube had also blocked ads on videos that contained predatory comments.

While we can appreciate what YouTube is doing, their all-or-nothing approach isn’t sitting well with some creators who feel that it is unfair. However we can only hope that whatever YouTube is doing now is a temporary measure until they can come up with a more viable solution for the long-term.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: YouTube