Google has taken a major step to save its widely used video platform, YouTube. The search giant has rolled out updates on actions related to the safety of minors on the website. The company will now be disabling comments on videos featuring minors.
“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,” says the YouTube creator’s blog post.
However, it has been added that a small number of people will be able to keep the comments section active. However, they would need to actively moderate comments.
In addition, YouTube has introduced a new comments classifier that will identify and remove predatory comments. Also, this won’t change the monetisation of the video. “We accelerated its launch and now have a new comments classifier in place that is more sweeping in scope, and will detect and remove 2X more individual comments,” adds the post.
Lastly, the company says that it has removed several channels that violate the community guidelines. “Videos encouraging harmful and dangerous challenges targeting any audience are also clearly against our policies. We will continue to take action when creators violate our policies in ways that blatantly harm the broader user and creator community.”
In the related news, YouTube recently announced that it will no longer recommend conspiracy or medically inaccurate videos. These are said to violate the community guidelines of the website. Now, the video recommendation will “pull in recommendations from a wider set of topics”.
