NYT: On YouTube's Digial Playground an Open Gate for Pedophiles Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/world/americas/youtube-pedophiles.html This should be reason alone for a full investigation of GOOGL. On YouTube’s Digital Playground, an Open Gate for Pedophiles  “I got scared by the number of views,” said a Brazilian woman, Christiane C., whose young daughter posted a video of herself.CreditMaria Magdalena Arrellaga for The New York Times  Image  “I got scared by the number of views,” said a Brazilian woman, Christiane C., whose young daughter posted a video of herself.CreditCreditMaria Magdalena Arrellaga for The New York Times By Max Fisher and Amanda Taub Leer en español Christiane C. didn’t think anything of it when her 10-year-old daughter and a friend uploaded a video of themselves playing in a backyard pool. “The video is innocent, it’s not a big deal,” said Christiane, who lives in a Rio de Janeiro suburb. A few days later, her daughter shared exciting news: The video had thousands of views. Before long, it had ticked up to 400,000 — a staggering number for a video of a child in a two-piece bathing suit with her friend. “I saw the video again and I got scared by the number of views,” Christiane said. She had reason to be. Advertisement YouTube’s automated recommendation system — which drives most of the platform’s billions of views by suggesting what users should watch next — had begun showing the video to users who watched other videos of prepubescent, partially clothed children, a team of researchers has found. YouTube had curated the videos from across its archives, at times plucking out the otherwise innocuous home movies of unwitting families, the researchers say. In many cases, its algorithm referred users to the videos after they watched sexually themed content. The result was a catalog of videos that experts say sexualizes children. “It’s YouTube’s algorithm that connects these channels,” said Jonas Kaiser, one of three researchers at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society who stumbled onto the videos while looking into YouTube’s impact in Brazil. “That’s the scary thing.” The video of Christiane’s daughter was promoted by YouTube’s systems months after the company was alerted that it had a pedophile problem. In February, Wired and other news outlets reported that predators were using the comment section of YouTube videos with children to guide other pedophiles. That month, calling the problem “deeply concerning,” YouTube disabled comments on many videos with children in them. Advertisement But the recommendation system, which remains in place, has gathered dozens of such videos into a new and easily viewable repository, and pushed them out to a vast audience. YouTube never set out to serve users with sexual interests in children — but in the end, Mr. Kaiser said, its automated system managed to keep them watching with recommendations that he called “disturbingly on point.” Users do not need to look for videos of children to end up watching them. The platform can lead them there through a progression of recommendations. So a user who watches erotic videos might be recommended videos of women who become conspicuously younger, and then women who pose provocatively in children’s clothes. Eventually, some users might be presented with videos of girls as young as 5 or 6 wearing bathing suits, or getting dressed or doing a split. On its own, each video might be perfectly innocent, a home movie, say, made by a child. Any revealing frames are fleeting and appear accidental. But, grouped together, their shared features become unmistakable.  YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, Calif.CreditJosh Edelson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images  Image  YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, Calif.CreditJosh Edelson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images “I’m really scared of it,” said Christiane. “Scared of the fact that a video like this fell into such a category.” The New York Times is withholding the family’s surname to protect its privacy. (cont'd)