YouTube to disable comments in videos featuring children

Taking steps towards ensuring safety of minors, YouTube has decided to disable and remove comments from videos featuring children in them.

Social media platform YouTube announced on Thursday that in coming months, it is will remove comments from videos that feature minors in them. Only selected few channels with children will be allowed to include a comment section, but they too will be required to monitor their comments to ensure safety.

“These channels will be required to actively moderate their comments, beyond just using our moderation tools, and demonstrate a low risk of predatory behavior,” YouTube wrote in its blog post.

Also, the firm said that it has launched a better algorithm to let it automatically ‘identify and remove predatory comments’. The classifier is ‘more sweeping in scope’ and will also catch up to twice as many predatory comments from individuals. YouTube also clearly mentioned that none of this will affect the creators’ monetization.

The Verge reported, YouTube’s decision comes in the wake of major firms like Disney, Nestlé, Epic Games and AT&T pausing ad spending after discovering their ads were playing on videos that had predatory and pedophilic comments on them.

As an initial response, over the past week, YouTube has disabled comments from tens of millions of videos that could be subject to predatory behavior. Also, it has terminated certain channels that attempt to endanger children in any way.