YouTube to ban comments on videos featuring minors after outcry

YouTube said it’s banning comments on some videos featuring minors, responding to criticism and the loss of advertisers after the service was used by potential predators to exploit children.

The Google unit, one of the world’s largest video services, disabled comments from tens of millions of videos “that could be subject to predatory behaviour” and will continue to identify similar troubling videos in coming months, the company said Thursday in an unsigned blog post.

“We will be broadening this action to suspend comments on videos featuring young minors and videos featuring older minors that could be at risk of attracting predatory behaviour,” YouTube added.