Some of the world’s most recognizable companies have pulled their adverts from YouTube after their campaigns appeared alongside videos featuring children and sexualised comments.
HP, Deutsche Bank, Mars and Sky have all dropped their ads from the video-sharing site, with German discount supermarket Lidl – another to pull its campaign from YouTube – saying it was “shocked and disturbed” that explicit comments on videos of young children had not been removed.
Lidl took aim at parent company Google, claiming the revelations showed that “the strict policies which Google has assured us were in place to tackle offensive content are ineffective”.
A spokesperson for Mars echoed those comments and added: “Until we have confidence that appropriate safeguards are in place, we will not advertise on YouTube and Google.”
BBC investigation
According to an investigation by the BBC, YouTube’s system for reporting sexual comments on children’s video has not been working properly for more than a year.
There is currently no way to know when a banned user sets up a new account under a new name and volunteer moderators estimate that there could be as many as 100,000 predatory accounts leaving inappropriate comments on videos.
Investigators identified at least 28 comments that were deemed to obviously violate YouTube’s guidelines, including phone numbers for adults and requests for videos to satisfy sexual fetishes.
Unacceptable
“Content that endangers children is abhorrent and unacceptable to us,” a spokesperson for YouTube said on Friday.
“We have clear policies against videos and comments on YouTube 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.”
It’s not the first time YouTube has come under fire from advertisers. Earlier this year HSBC, L’Oreal and Audi were among several brands who took down their ads after finding out they were appearing next to extremist content.
The scandal hasn’t affected Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) shares though, with the stock up 0.4% to US$1,039.82 early on Friday morning.