Some of the world’s biggest brands are advertising on YouTube videos showing scantily clad children that have attracted comments from hundreds of paedophiles, The Times can reveal.
BT, Adidas, Deutsche Bank, eBay, Amazon, Mars, Diageo and Talktalk are among dozens of brands whose adverts appear on the videos, which are published on the Google-owned platform. Many have gained millions of views by showing young girls filming themselves in underwear, doing the splits, brushing their teeth or rolling around in bed.
Most appear to have been posted by innocent children. Paedophiles flock to such content, however, by searching for certain keywords in Russian that can bring up hundreds of young Slavic girls.
YouTube’s algorithms then suggest similar clips — including one showing naked toddlers in a bath. The videos’ comment sections are used by paedophiles to exchange links to child abuse and to make lewd comments. In some cases, they directly encourage the children posting the footage to perform sexual acts.
One video with 6.5 million views shows a prepubescent girl in a nightie. It includes adverts from companies including Michael Kors, the fashion brand, and Cadbury, the confectionery company. One of the less explicit comments states: “I would like to be your stepfather to grope you very well every night mmmm.”
Another, with 4.1 million views and carrying adverts from Amazon, Stella McCartney, Now TV, Argos, Dolmio and Enfield council in north London, shows a girl in pants and a vest on a bed filled with cuddly toys. At one point she pulls her knees up to touch her head. “I would like to kiss your fragrant panties,” one commenter wrote.
By advertising on a video, the brands may have funded the content’s creator, who would typically receive 55 per cent of all revenue with the rest going to YouTube. A creator gets up to $7 for each 1,000 views.
“Sexualised images of children in swimwear or underwear are popular among paedophiles because it isn’t always illegal; they can go on mainstream platforms and get their fix,” Einar Otto Stangvik, a Norwegian security expert, said. “There is a risk that these videos will end up on the dark web or in abuse-related discussion groups.”
Last night brands including Adidas, Mars, HP, Diageo, Cadbury, Deutsche Bank and Lidl pulled campaigns from YouTube on the eve of Black Friday, one of the biggest online shopping days of the year. Adidas said the situation was “completely unacceptable”. Mars, which had four of its brands advertised, said that until safeguards were in place “we will not advertise on YouTube”. Diageo said it was enforcing an “immediate stop”. Sky, the owner of the Now TV brand, pulled Now TV advertising. Enfield council also withdrew.
“Yet again it appears that YouTube’s rhetoric about taking child safeguarding seriously nowhere matches its actions,” Tim Loughton, a Tory member of the home affairs select committee, said. “Their platforms are in danger of being used as a sweet shop for paedophiles.”
The Times has learnt that many of the videos remained on YouTube despite previously being reported to the site. One member of Google’s “trusted flagger” programme, a group with the task of identifying inappropriate content, claimed that just three unpaid volunteers were responsible for rooting out child-inappropriate content. “Since August this year, we’ve reported over 12,000 predators to YouTube,” he said. “There is far too much for a few volunteers to handle — there are at least 50,000 active predators [on the site]. YouTube know the scale and their inaction is resulting in the sexual exploitation of more children every day.”
YouTube is understood not to pro-actively check for inappropriate content, instead relying on its technology, third-party non-governmental organisations, and police forces to flag it.
The UK Google chief today questioned whether the company was doing enough to prevent inappropriate material on their platforms. “‘Are we doing everything within our power, given the advances in technology, to identify the emergence of new categories of questionable content on the platform?’ And that’s a very live issue at the moment,” Ed Harris, managing director of Google UK and Ireland, told Campaign magazine.
Mr Harris added that YouTube needs to come up with a global, not just a UK solution: “The nature of the platform is it’s not enough to do something in just one market, you’ve got to sort it out on the platform globally.”
A “flagger”, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Times that only about 26 individuals, in addition to the organisations, were active in the programme. Of these, three had taken it upon themselves to root out child predators.“YouTube do not care about the safety of children, they only care about their image,” they claimed.
Tony Stower, public and policy affairs manager at the NSPCC, said: “This is yet another example of why it is not good enough for sites like YouTube to be marking their own homework. Government intervention is vital to protect children from the moment they sign up to social networks.”
YouTube said it worked closely with the Internet Watch Foundation, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and others to prevent child sexual abuse imagery from being uploaded. “Content that endangers children is abhorrent and unacceptable to us,” a spokeswoman said. “We have clear policies against videos and comments which sexualise or exploit children and we enforce them aggressively whenever alerted to such content. We have recently toughened our approach to videos and comments featuring children which may not be illegal, but give cause for concern. There shouldn’t be any ads running on this content and we are working urgently to fix this.”
Argos and Talktalk said they were concerned at an unacceptable situation. The others did not respond. BT said it would blacklist YouTube publishers who posted inappropriate content.
The findings came as a separate investigation by the BBC revealed that YouTube’s system for reporting dangerous and abusive content was broken for over a year. Sources said that when people use a form to report an account, YouTube’s moderators could not always view the links to specific videos and comments they entered to support their complaint. This made it difficult for them to act. YouTube denied that there was any technical problem.
Commenting on both investigations, Anne Longfield, the children’s commissioner, told Radio 4’s Today programme that she had previously raised concerns to YouTube about its failure to act on this material.
“My judgment is that they are complacent. Of course we have had statements this time, and have had them many times before, that there is a commitment to safety, but I don’t think that commitment shows through into action,” she said.
“We see the lack of action in terms of the posts being taken down when they’re reported and many children say to me that they won’t even bother to report things anymore because they don’t believe action will be taken.
“And then there’s a bigger question of why wait for people to report [this content]. I’d like to see social media companies get on the front foot here and employ people who are monitoring, who are identifying and are taking content down actually before children got to see it.”
She added: “I can bring pressure on government to act on this. And of course regulation is there looming if companies don’t self-regulate themselves.”
