YouTube’s Problem

Matt Watson posted a 20-minute video in 2019 showing how YouTube’s algorithm and comment sections had become a staging ground for child predators. Five clicks could take you from the homepage to a rabbit hole of videos featuring young girls in gymnastics or dance videos, and from there into comment threads where men posted timestamps of moments children were exposed or in positions they found arousing. These moments got compiled into videos, downloaded, and traded on private sites. No one told the kids this was happening.

The advertisers noticed. Disney, Nestlé, Epic Games pulled out. It wasn’t a shock to them because YouTube had done this before—in 2017, the same thing happened, and Adidas, Amazon, Deutsche Bank left too.

YouTube’s response hasn’t changed. They told reporters they had policies, they’d closed accounts, they’d disabled comments on millions of videos, they were committed to doing better. The video went viral because you could still see it happening.

The weird part is how little seems to have actually changed. Alphabet owns YouTube. They can predict what you’ll watch next, optimize ad delivery, measure engagement in real time. Apparently they can’t or won’t prevent organized predators from coordinating in comment sections. After being caught twice, losing major advertisers both times, the question stops being whether they can fix it and becomes whether they want to.