YouTube will now disable comments on all videos featuring children

YouTube has announced a few sweeping changes amid a number of controversies involving children’s safety on the platform.

In a post on the YouTube Creator Blog, the company laid out the actions being taken. The biggest update: YouTube will now disable comments on all videos featuring minors.

YouTube states that this change will be rolled out over the next few months. Comments will be disabled on all videos featuring young minors as well as videos with older minors that “could be at risk of attracting predatory behavior.”

Select creators that would otherwise be affected by this change will be allowed to keep comments enabled on their videos. They will be required to actively moderate their comments and keep predatory content off their video pages. YouTube will work with them to provide guidance.

In a statement provided to Mashable, a YouTube spokesperson said:

“Over the past week, we’ve been taking a number of steps to better protect children and families, including suspending comments on tens of millions of videos. Now, we will begin suspending comments on most videos that feature minors, with the exception of a small number of channels that actively moderate their comments and take additional steps to protect children. We understand that comments are an important way creators build and connect with their audiences, we also know that this is the right thing to do to protect the YouTube community.”

Last week, YouTube suspended comments on tens of millions of videos following a YouTuber’s exposé on pedophiliac content on the platform. Child predators were using the comments section on videos featuring kids to link to moments in the video where the minor could be found in compromising positions. The comments also included contacts where pedophiles could trade child pornography off of YouTube’s platform.

Along with disabling comments on videos featuring minors, YouTube also announced that it sped up the launch of a “more effective” classifier which can identify and remove double the amount of individual predatory comments than before.

YouTube has also terminated accounts that attempt to harm children, like the FilthyFrankClips channel which was behind the controversial video which gave suicide tips to kids. The video platform says they will continue to take action and ban users who violate their policies.

These actions taken by YouTube clearly signal how seriously the company takes these issues. However, with the sheer amount of video content uploaded to YouTube every day, disabling comments as the default on every clip featuring a minor seems like a daunting task. For one, how can YouTube automatically identify whether a video features a child? What's the difference between a "younger minor" and an "older minor?" How did the company determine which creators were allowed to keep comments enabled?

Mashable reached out to YouTube for answers to the above questions and will update this when we hear back.