Source: Your HHRS News
During the trial of an accused child pornographer, the defense lawyer ridiculed a piece of evidence: a CD containing a thousand adult porn images and barely a dozen child porn images, and all the images being named with numbers. But wouldn’t that be a smart way to do it — bury the images in adult porn, number everything, include a coded message about how to find them, and blame it on “the studio” if anyone noticed? Well, according to a late February video posted on YouTube and a Variety.com article:
…YouTube’s algorithms enabled child predators to secretly connect across a series of videos with young girls engaged in everyday activities…(M)embers of…a “soft-core pedophilia ring” made sexualized comments about the girls tagged with timestamps identifying moments when the(y) were in certain poses…
(M)arketers including Disney, AT&T, Epic Games, Hasbro, McDonald’s and Nestlé (have) suspend(ed) their advertising on YouTube…In addition to…disabling comments on videos with kids, YouTube reiterated that it had terminated certain channels for predatory behavior.
Apparently disabling the ability to make time stamps was not an option. But what does all this have to do with health, medicine, health and fitness all around New Jersey? Simply that YouTube has massacred hundreds of thousands of perfectly innocent bystanders in the process — and quite needlessly.
It has been the privilege of YourHHRS News to work with Chris Ulmer of Special Books By Special Kids (SBSK) fame. And we do mean “fame:” his video interviews of people of all ages and nationalities who have physical and developmental conditions have earned him more than a million YouTube subscribers, and equally important, YourHHRS News coverage that has been featured here and here.
But SBSK is even more important than its videos: The conversations that take place in the comments run the gamut from educational to just plain uplifting. We’d provide samples, but YouTube has disabled all the comments in all 280 of their videos.
In an open letter to YouTube, Ulmer wrote:
I am incredibly proud of SBSK’s followers and the empowerment and ownership they feel towards our channel…Our comment section is where the individuals we feature often hear and experience societal acceptance for the first time…(It) is monitored by us and policed by our community…
(T)here has to be a way that we can…protect…minors on YouTube without isolating and silencing the disability community once more. In trying to do the right thing with an emphasis to protect your advertisers, you have…hurt…and censored…individuals (who) are not the pedophiles you were targeting…
The rest of the letter, the rest of the video, and an online petition to have SBSK’s comments reinstated, are available here; we urge all to sign it, and we thank you in advance. #UnSilenceSBSK!
P.S. The child pornographer was found guilty on all counts.