YouTube CEO Promises To Disable Comments On Kids Videos

Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube is making efforts in reassuring parents, as well as advertisers after the company received more criticism on how it has enabled children exploitation.

YouTube also posted on its Twitter update on the company's safety policies for young people.

In an interview held on March 3, Wojcicki said:

Wojcicki said to Kara Swisher from Recode that young people might feel upset or inconvenient by the changes in YouTube channels, but as long as they can keep people safe, they are all worth it.

At the Lesbians Who Teach conference organized in San Francisco, every quarter, hundreds of millions of comments are removed from videos by the video-sharing platform. But the volume of videos and comments is enormous. She mentioned that the company is relying more and more on algorithms to handle those comments and remove troubling videos.

After receiving complaints on how users were steered toward hate speech or conspiracy theories, the company recently also decided to modify its recommendations algorithm. Moreover, anti-vaccine videos’ makers would never be permitted to run ads.

Wojcicki says that more powerful tools for abusive comments detection are activated. But, YouTube has been criticized for not promptly handle exploitative comments or videos.

Two years ago, hundreds of companies took off their ads from YouTube because they were put next to extremist ones. The boycott came to an end after the company vows to make changes.