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Americas | On YouTube’s Digital Playground, an Open Gate for Pedophiles
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On YouTube’s Digital Playground, an Open Gate for Pedophiles
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Read More on Artificial Intelligence Public Defenders: Clearview AI’s facial recognition software has been largely restricted to law enforcement. Now, the company plans to offer access to defense lawyers . Creating Art: Artwork made with artificial intelligence won a prize at the Colorado State Fair’s art competition — and set off fierce backlash about how art is generated . Making Strides: We’re in a golden age of progress in artificial intelligence. It’s time to start taking its potential and risks seriously, our technology columnist writes . Are These People Real?: We created our own artificial-technology system to understand how easy it is for a computer to generate fake faces .
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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.
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.
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.
“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.
When The Times alerted YouTube that its system was circulating family videos to people seemingly motivated by sexual interest in children, the company removed several but left up many others, including some apparently uploaded by fake accounts.
The recommendation system itself also immediately changed, no longer linking some of the revealing videos together. YouTube said this was probably a result of routine tweaks to its algorithms, rather than a deliberate policy change.
Jennifer O’Connor, YouTube’s product director for trust and safety, said the company was committed to eradicating the exploitation of children on its platform and had worked nonstop since February on improving enforcement. “Protecting kids is at the top of our list,” she said.
But YouTube has not put in place the one change that researchers say would prevent this from happening again: turning off its recommendation system on videos of children, though the platform can identify such videos automatically. The company said that because recommendations are the biggest traffic driver, removing them would hurt “creators” who rely on those clicks. It did say it would limit recommendations on videos that it deems as putting children at risk.
YouTube has described its recommendation system as artificial intelligence that is constantly learning which suggestions will keep users watching. These recommendations, it says, drive 70 percent of views, but the company does not reveal details of how the system makes its choices.
Some studies have found what researchers call a “rabbit hole effect”: The platform, they say, leads viewers to incrementally more extreme videos or topics, which are thought to hook them in.
Watch a few videos about makeup, for example, and you might get a recommendation for a viral makeover video. Watch clips about bicycling and YouTube might suggest shocking bike race crashes.
Mr. Kaiser and his fellow researchers, Yasodara Córdova and Adrian Rauchfleisch, set out to test for the effect in Brazil. A server opened videos, then followed YouTube’s top recommendations for what to watch next. Running this experiment thousands of times allowed them to trace something like a subway map for how the platform directs its users.
They also followed YouTube’s recommendations on channels, the pages that host videomakers’ work. Though YouTube says these are rarely clicked, they offered a way to control for any statistical noise generated by how the platform suggests videos.
When they followed recommendations on sexually themed videos, they noticed something they say disturbed them: In many cases, the videos became more bizarre or extreme, and placed greater emphasis on youth. Videos of women discussing sex, for example, sometimes led to videos of women in underwear or breast-feeding, sometimes mentioning their age: 19, 18, even 16.
Some women solicited donations from “sugar daddies” or hinted at private videos where they posed nude. After a few clicks, some played more overtly at prepubescence, posing in children’s clothing.
From there, YouTube would suddenly begin recommending videos of young and partially clothed children, then a near-endless stream of them drawn primarily from Latin America and Eastern Europe.
Ms. Córdova, who has also studied distribution of online pornography, says she recognized what was happening.
Any individual video might be intended as nonsexual, perhaps uploaded by parents who wanted to share home movies among family. But YouTube’s algorithm, in part by learning from users who sought out revealing or suggestive images of children, was treating the videos as a destination for people on a different sort of journey.
And the extraordinary view counts — sometimes in the millions — indicated that the system had found an audience for the videos and was keeping that audience engaged.
Some researchers believe that when it comes to some material, engaging certain interests risks encouraging them as well.
“It’s incredibly powerful, and people get drawn into that,” said Stephen Blumenthal, a London-based psychologist who treats people for deviant sexual interests and behaviors.
And YouTube, by showing videos of children alongside more mainstream sexual content, as well as displaying the videos’ high view counts, risked eroding the taboo against pedophilia, psychologists said.
“You normalize it,” said Marcus Rogers, a psychologist at Purdue who has done research on child pornography .
YouTube says there is no rabbit hole effect.
“It’s not clear to us that necessarily our recommendation engine takes you in one direction or another,” said Ms. O’Connor, the product director. Still, she said, “when it comes to kids, we just want to take a much more conservative stance for what we recommend.”
Most people who view sexualized imagery leave it at that, researchers say. But some of the videos on YouTube include links to the youngsters’ social media accounts.
“A lot of people that are actively involved in chatting with kids are very, very adept at grooming these kids into posting more sexualized pictures or engaging in sexual activity and having it videotaped,” said Dr. Rogers.
YouTube does not allow children under 13 to have channels. The company says it enforces the policy aggressively.
For parents, there are no easy solutions, said Jenny Coleman, the director of Stop It Now, an organization that combats sexual exploitation of children.
“Even the most careful of families can get swept into something that is harmful or criminal,” she said.
In reporting this article, when The Times could find contact information for parents of children in the videos, it contacted local organizations that could help them.
After one such organization contacted Christiane, the mother from Brazil, she offered to discuss her experience.
Furious, she is struggling to absorb what had happened. She fretted over what to tell her husband. She expressed confusion at YouTube’s practices. And she worried over how to keep her daughter, now on display to a city-size audience, safe.
“The only thing I can do,” she said, “is forbid her to publish anything on YouTube.”

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May 2, 2006 12:00 am PST

Just as in the 1980s, when the Betamax and VHS video formats were battling it out for supremacy, the pornography industry will likely play a major role in determining which of the two blue-laser DVD formats -- Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD -- will be the winner in the battle to replace DVDs for high-definition content.

Ron Wagner, director of IT operations at E! Entertainment Television Inc. in Los Angeles, said his company has already chosen the Blu-ray Disc format, in large part because of talk in the porn industry favoring it over rival HD-DVD.

Wagner said that while attending last year’s National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) annual conference in Las Vegas, more than one panel discussed “several major players in the porn industry going the Blu-ray route.” He said the rivalry between Blu-ray and HD-DVD was also the buzz around NAB 2006 last month.

“If you look at the VHS vs. Beta standards, you see the much higher-quality standard dying because of [the porn industry’s support of VHS],” he said. “The mass volume of tapes in the porn market at the time went out on VHS.”

E! Entertainment is using Blu-Ray discs primarily for Sony Corp.’s XDCam applications for acquisition of television programming materials. The television network, which has more than 85 million subscribers to its celebrity gossip and entertainment news, said it is not considering optical formats for long-term data archiving but will stick with magnetic tape for now.

The pornography industry, which generates an estimated $57 billion in annual revenue worldwide, has always been a fast leader when it comes to the use of new technology, according to analysts.

Porn studio Digital Playground Inc., which claims to have produced the largest number of high-definition movies in the industry over the past three years, said it is choosing Blu-ray Disc for all of its “interactive” videos because of its greater capacity. It also selected Blue-ray because Sony chose the format for its PlayStation 3 (PS3) box, due out in November.

The co-founder of Chatsworth, Calif.-based Digital Playground, who goes by the one-word name “Joone,” said the fact that Sony chose Blu-ray guarantees his studio an instant home audience.

“PlayStation 3 is going to be the Trojan horse that will get a lot of numbers into the home theater systems -- the living rooms,” said Joone, who is also a movie director. “Technology-wise, we’ve chosen Blu-ray, which doesn’t mean we won’t support both formats ... but as far as having really cool technology and a lot of storage for future-proof, Blu-ray is a good format.”

Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD are the new optical-disc formats that are positioned as replacements for DVDs with high-definition content.

Blu-ray is not only backed by entertainment giant Sony, but Panasonic Corporation of North America, LG Electronics Inc., Philips Electronics NV and movie studios The Walt Disney Co. and Fox Filmed Entertainment. Blu-ray offers storage up to 50GB capacity, or up to nine hours of high-definition content. In contrast, HD-DVD has 30GB capacity and is supported by companies including Toshiba Corp., NEC Corp. and Warner Home Video Inc.

Paul O’Donovan, an analyst at Gartner Inc., said pornography’s support of either DVD format will be a “strong factor” to the uptake of the technology by the general marketplace, but even more critical is Sony’s adoption of the technology.

O’Donovan said even though the Blu-ray format will be more expensive initially and will come after that of HD-DVD, the sheer support it is receiving from the entertainment industry, including pornography studios, will catapult it to a victory within a range of 18 months to five years.

Steve Hirsch, head of the adult film studio Vivid Entertainment Group, said he’s currently using the HD-DVD format because it was the first to be available, but his studio will begin burning to the Blu-ray format as soon as it’s available.

“The adult industry has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to technology. We don’t have any theatrical distribution issues, nor do we have 'big box' retailers, like Wal-Mart and Blockbuster, to cater to. We’re forced to find distribution wherever we can,” Hirsch said.

Hirsch, who founded Vivid Entertainment in 1984, said the porn industry -- just as in the 1980s -- will have a big influence on the outcome of the latest high-definition video-format wars. In the 1980s, Hirsch said VHS tapes started selling for $50 a piece, and Betamax sold for $55. “Therefore, we pushed VHS harder, and in that sense, we did have something to do with VHS winning out,” said Hirsch, whose studio pulls in an estimated $100 million in revenue a year.

“It was the adult industry who jumped right in and were putting movies on both VHS and Beta. We pushed the actual technology more than anyone else,” he said. “The adult industry has always been ahead when comes to technology.”

But not everyone believes the format war will be determined by the porn industry. Steve Duplessie, founder of research firm Enterprise Strategy Group Inc. in Milford, Mass., and a Computerworld columnist, said the porn industry’s influence over the fate of VHS and the upcoming high-definition DVD formats is overstated. Duplessie said VHS ultimately won over Betamax because Betamax was a proprietary format owned by Sony, while VHS was more open.

“I love the whole pornography concept simply because porn is still the No. 1 money-making use of the Internet," he said. "But I don’t believe the porn industry will drive the format. Like any other industry, it will supply what the consumer wants."
Senior Reporter Lucas Mearian covers Windows, Future of Work issues, mobile, Apple in the enterprise, and healthcare IT.
Copyright © 2006 IDG Communications, Inc.
Copyright © 2022 IDG Communications, Inc.

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