YouTube recommends videos of underage girls

Following the discovery earlier this year that pedophiles had infiltrated sections of YouTube video commentaries with kids, Google's video platform has disabled comments on many children's videos.

According to researchers, disturbing patterns remain: a report published Monday in the New York Times said that watching erotic videos and following the recommendations of the platform could eventually lead to videos of children.

Researchers at the Berkman Klein Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard University were looking at YouTube's impact on Brazil. They added that internet users who viewed erotic videos could be recommended videos of women dressing in girls and possibly videos of "girls as young as 5 or 6 years old" dressed in swimsuits or dresses, indicated the report.

According to the article, YouTube's referral system has changed to no longer link some of the revealing videos, but the company told the New York Times that it was "probably the result of routine adjustments." of his algorithms, rather than a deliberate change in his policy ". YouTube also said that disabling its recommendation system on children's videos would "hurt" creators "who rely on these clicks", but said it would limit recommendations on videos that it would considers endangering children, the report said.

A spokesperson for YouTube spoke about a blog post published on his blog titled "Update on our efforts to protect minors and their families."

The article described some changes made in recent months, as well as new changes, including restrictive recommendations for "videos with minors in risky situations". YouTube has also made changes to its machine learning classifier, which will help identify videos that put miners at risk.

Read the New York Times report here.