Throughout the years, YouTube has changed its rules and conditions to benefit their creators, but in recent years with all of the controversy over ads and demonetization, their creators are feeling more helpless. The newest situation to arise from the media company is that they disabled the ability to comment on any video that has children in them. There are a lot of family vloggers/ channels on YouTube and this has caused a huge uproar in the community.
Youtube's whole point of this action is that "videos of young children doing activities like gymnastics were being targeted by commenters making sexual comments, or inviting the children to talk" (The Verge). No YouTube is saying that they are doing this to keep pedophiles out of the comments of these family videos, but for the rest of the community on that channel, YouTube has destroyed it. This is definitely a good motive, but bad execution kind of situation. From what I have seen a lot of these family channels are really upset about this, not necessarily because of the reasoning, but the fact that they will not be able to interact with their community. Here are just a few examples:
"Dear anyone who may watch our YouTube videos: Youtube has disabled commenting on all videos that may have kids in them due to pedophiles commenting inappropriate things. I'm sorry for the 99.9% of you who aren't pedophiles. Love you guys & thanks always for the support" -Cole LaBrant
"I double dog dare you to go to http://youtube.com/gilroyvlogs and try and comment on one of my videos! **Spoiler** YOU CAN'T Why are my comments disabled @TeamYouTube and how is it other channels, just like mine, still have comments enabled?!?! Like really?" -Chase Gilroy
"YouTube just disabled all of our comments. Including the videos with no kids in them at all, like Christopher's Valentine's Day video to me. I love you guys so much and I am so sad to see all of your sweet messages just gone" -Jessica Ballinger
One of the main ways that YouTuber's interact with their communities is through the comment section on their videos. Now I think it's great that YouTube was trying to make it a safe space, but they went about this in completely the wrong way. Not only has this change affected the family channels, but it is also starting to affect some of the other channels as well. A prime example comes from Colleen Ballinger a.k.a. Miranda Sings:
"Here's the issue. This doesn't just affect family vloggers who are featuring their children doing gymnastics. All of the comments on my vlog channel were just disabled and I am not a family vlogging channel. 90% of my vlogs are just of me. This affects all YouTube creators!" -Colleen Ballinger
This decision has thrown the whole of the YouTube community for a loop, from the creators to the viewers. Youtube has even said that due to the nature of some comments, the videos will not receive ads:
"With regard to the actions that we've taken, even if your video is suitable for advertisers, inappropriate comments could result in your video receiving limited or no ads (yellow icon). Let us know if you have any questions" -TeamYouTube
YouTube has changed a lot over the years, but this might have been one that was a little bit of an overstep. In the end, the original intention was good, but the outcome has been received very poorly. I don't agree with the way YouTube has gone about this, but what do you think?
