YouTube creators have been faced with demonetization on their videos featuring young children as a result of a growing controversy regarding pedophilic comments on the videos. Advertisers are halting all advertisement on the videos that are being flooded with pedophilic comments, causing the content creator to lose earnings for their videos.

The issue, however, has roots that can be traced back to what is described as a “pedophilia ring” on the website. YouTuber Matt Watson posted a video in February explaining how YouTube’s recommendation algorithm can negatively impact the facilitated access to videos of younger kids. In his video, he gives a scenario wherein a user searches up “bikini haul” and almost instantly Watson points out that on the sidebar, there are videos of young girls. He clicked on one- still simulating what the user would do- and again, his sidebar was flooded with innocent videos of younger kids doing gymnastics and playing. He looked into the comments and found that one user had commented time stamps- locations within the video- wherein the children in the video were in “compromising positions, in sexually implicit positions” as he states in the video. Watson also pointed out that once a user enters that “wormhole”, YouTube recommendations only displayed videos of young girls.

On February 28th, the company posted an update on their Creator Blog regarding the precautions they intended to take regarding the situation. One of their proposed solutions was to disable comments on videos featuring minors. They wrote, “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.”

This statement created controversy for many YouTube creators whose content primarily features their children or any young child overall. Many family vloggers were speaking out against YouTube’s proposed solution. Jessica Ballinger from the family channel Ballinger Family tweeted on March 15th about the situation:

In a following tweet she said:

Although family vloggers are the ones primarily affected by YouTube’s proposed solution, other channels that primarily feature young children are also being struck with demonetization and disabled comments. The channel Special Books by Special Kids is a channel that was started by Chris, a special education teacher; in his videos, he shares the stories of young children with disabilities and helps bring these disabilities to light. Unfortunately, Chris’ channel has been affected by YouTube’s decision; his videos have the comments disabled, which prevents any form of communication with his viewers. The channel uploaded a video explaining how YouTube’s policies were affecting the content and followed up with a video thanking all those that joined the petition to #UnsilenceSBSK.

Content creators that appear to be talking about this issue in their videos are apparently being struck with comment disabling and demonetization as well. Colleen Ballinger, the creator of Miranda Sings, recently uploaded a vlog where she talked about her thoughts about the whole situation (and where she also briefly showed clips of her three-month-old baby). Not too much time later, she tweeted:

Ballinger proceeded to livestream on YouTube about an hour after tweeting that. On the live stream, she talked about her frustration and even said that YouTube was also going to disable the comments on her live stream once it was over. Surely enough, after her live video ended, Ballinger tweeted:

At the current time of publishing this article, the comments on both her original vlog and the live stream are accessible.

However, thousands of other creators are still struggling with these issues that YouTube does not seem to have a clear response to.