YouTube is haemorrhaging advertisers after it was discovered the Google owned video sharing platform is supposedly hosting a paedophilic photo ring.
Multiple corporations including Disney, Nestlé, McDonalds and Epic Games have pulled their advertisements from the site after blogger Matt Watson posted a video exposé showing YouTube’s algorithms would link to seemingly innocuous videos of young children.
Disturbingly however, the videos feature young, prepubescent girls in bikinis and underwear and often in compromising positions.
Most shocking of all however, is that Watson demonstrated that paedophiles were taking the original videos re-uploading them and then timestamping in the comments them at moments when the girls were in sexually implicit position.
The timestamped images are then being shared on the encrypted messaging app WhatsApp which was itself recently embroiled in a child porn scandal.
Watson went on to show that once you first encounter this content YouTube’s algorithm does not link to any other content at all except similar videos.
This is extremely unusual when using YouTube as even when searching for specific topics such as ‘politics’ other content will still appear but not in this case.
YouTube has been criticised in the past for allegedly censoring conservative, nationalist or conspiratorial content but this type of paedophilic content has seemingly not been a cause for concern at Google until now.
In an email to Bloomberg a YouTube spokesperson said,
“We took immediate action by deleting accounts and channels, reporting illegal activity to authorities and disabling violative comments,”
This response came after multiple advertisers paused their halted their ad campaigns on the site, the video sharing platform.
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