The Philip DeFranco Show - PDS 2.19 Youtube's Predator Problem Stokes Fear and Concern, Malia Obama "Exposed", & More...

Episode Date: February 19, 2019

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Sup you beautiful bastards, hope you're having a fantastic Tuesday. Welcome back to the Philip DeFranco Show and let's just jump into it. The first thing we're gonna talk about today is the story that just blew up yesterday. I personally found it to be a nothing story, but we had Malia Obama in the news. This because the Daily Mail dropped the bombshell that, oh my god, Malia Obama, who doesn't turn 21 until July 4th, was drinking wine. Also seemingly of note in the article, she was wearing a bikini. I know what you're thinking. This is what the bottom looks like. How will America ever recover?

I don't know if it will because the next day the Daily Mail dropped another bombshell. Oh my god. The Daily Mail released an article the next day saying, Malia Obama has a secret Facebook account where she has said negative things about Donald Trump. Granted, they say the Facebook page hasn't been updated since 2017, but I mean, could you even imagine a world where Barack Obama's daughter might harbor negative feelings towards a man who promoted the birther movement. And if you can't tell yet, I think these stories are incredibly dumb.

I'm personally of the belief of leave the kids of the president or former presidents the hell alone. Right, if it's in their private lives, leave them the hell alone. Like if people went after Barron Trump, fuck you. I think it's pretty simple, right? The situation is different when you have someone like a Donald Trump Jr. or a Chelsea Clinton, right? Someone that is actively, publicly participating in the general space. But this stuff with Malia Obama and also like the pictures,

it's just really, really creepy. And this is kind of my just general thinking, but also very specifically towards Daily Mail, who has just put out article upon article about Malia Obama over the years. And I think across the, you know, the complete political spectrum, that people agree with that, right?

It was one of the few things where you had the Chelsea Clintons of the world somewhat agreeing with the Ben Shapiros of the world. Yeah, just something I wanted to mention. And then let's talk about a big update to a story we covered yesterday around Donald Trump, the border wall, the declaration of a national emergency, because, sure enough, late last night, 16 states filed a lawsuit in the Ninth Circuit

in the Northern District of California against Donald Trump. The suit was signed by the attorneys general of each of the 16 states, and of all the states that signed, only Maryland is currently governed by a Republican, and only Michigan gave all of its electoral votes to Donald Trump in 2016. And in their lawsuit, they say the national emergency is unconstitutional because the power to appropriate funds

belongs to Congress and not the executive branch. Also saying that this national emergency is just being used to go around congressional funding. And in their filing, along with saying that they're filing to quote, protect their residents' natural resourcesand economic interests from President Donald J. Trump's "'flagrant disregard of fundamental separation "'of powers principles ingrained "'in the United States Constitution.'"

They also say the national emergency could impact the state's funds, that it would take away other funding in order to build a border wall, and also that they see no reason for a national emergency, writing, "'By the President's own admission, "'an emergency declaration is not necessary.'"

Which is most likely a reference to this clip again. I didn't need to do this, but I'd rather do it much faster. And adding, the federal government's own data proved there is no national emergency at the southern border that warrants construction of a wall. And this morning, Donald Trump took to Twitter to express his frustrations towards the lawsuit, tweeting,

"'As I predicted, 16 states led mostly "'by open border Democrats and the radical left "'have filed a lawsuit in, of course, the Ninth Circuit. "'California, the state that has wasted billions of dollars on their out of control fast train with no hope of completion seems in charge. The failed fast train project in California where the cost overruns are becoming world record setting

is hundreds of times more expensive than the desperately needed wall. But ultimately, that is where we are with the situation right now. We're gonna have to wait to see what happens next. Then finally, let's talk about the story that's extremely uncomfortable to talk about, to look into further, but I think it's important that we do. What we're talking about today is this renewed focus on the child predators on the YouTube platform. And the main reason we're

all talking about this today is that there was a video released yesterday by a user by the name of Matt's What It Is and he highlights what he personally describes as soft core pedo porn. And before we dive into Matt's video and the situation at hand, I think it's important that we're all kind of on the same page. The videos range from things that are clearly child exploitation and meant to be viewed by pedophiles, to videos where it looks like maybe the child shot the video themselves for like a silly vlog, or gymnastics video, or maybe even something filmed by a parent for an innocent reason. However, these videos have one feature in common, which is the most disgusting and toxic comment section you will ever see.

Like, I don't even want to read the examples because they're just, they make me nauseous. And if you're thinking right now, this sounds familiar, it feels like we've talked about this before, we have. We talked about the seven super girls controversy, we talked about the Elsagate situation. And as you might remember, YouTube has been actively trying to combat this, this content,

as well as these comments. Following the Elsagate situation, YouTube set up a system in November of that year to disable comments on those videos. And in fact, at that time, telling Vice they had turned off comments on 625,000 videos. And telling Vice, over the past week,

we removed ads from nearly two million videos and over 50,000 channels masquerading as family-friendly content. Which brings us to Matt Watson's video that has blown up now. It's raised a lot of awareness around a very serious issue on this site. I'll link to it down below,

but kinda to give you the main takeaways from the video. First up, he says that he was able to find this content in as little as five clicks. And he would start with typing something that was relatively normal, and then within five links, he would be at one of these videos. Two, once you've seen one of these videos,

you're essentially stuck in a wormhole. The suggested content is almost all of these kinds of videos. And three, he pointed out that some of these videos are being monetized. And he tested all of this by sending a VPN to Canada. He did this because he wasn't sure how the algorithm acted in other countries, making a new account and clicking away.

And looking at this video, it seemed like his biggest issue was that he felt YouTube wasn't doing enough to combat the problem. So after watching Matt's video and feeling nauseous and just disgust and hatred towards people that prey on children, I had the question of, is it actually as easy to find this content as Matt claims? So we created a brand new YouTube account

and jumped right into the rabbit hole. The first thing we searched following Matt's lead was bikini haul. And we immediately saw a bunch of videos of girls trying on bikinis and the thumbnails of the third and fourth videos down featured girls that just looked extremely young. And keep in mind, this is literally zero clicks in.

This is just one search. And in that first video, the team saw a 14 year old try on a bunch of swimsuits. The video has 230,000 views, six ad breaks, and that channel has one million subscribers. Although, the comment section in general seemed weirded out by the video. Top comment reading, girl you need to put on

some appropriate clothes, you're 12 or 14. Another comment saying she needs to have more respect for her body and age. Clicking and immediately seeing a 12 year old flashing a bikini is not what I expected, I feel violated. Now, with one million subscribers, she is a relatively big YouTuber, so some people think that this is

kind of a different situation. But, once again, trying to replicate what Matt did, this is just the starting point. From here, the suggested videos seem pretty normal. To the team of those suggested, we chose this one. And from here, you can see the suggested videos in the sidebar now look a bit different and much creepier. The team then clicked on the suggested video third

from the top, in which we see a very young girl. When you look to the comments section, that is really where you start to see what Matt was talking about. The first comment is a time code that takes you to, I don't even feel appropriate showing any of these pictures. I guess to kind of explain, these people, they post timecodes in the comment section that show these young children in compromising or suggesting positions. Along with those, there are plenty of other just creepy, disgusting comments. And already, you're just- you're deep in the rabbit hole with a really troubling recommended section.

But yeah, that's the general situation around that video and us looking into it to try and replicate it. Now, in response to that video blowing up, people have been demanding that YouTube take more action. With people tweeting at YouTube and their CEO, Susan Wojcicki. Others saying that they're canceling their YouTube Premium subscriptions. We also saw a lot of brands getting dragged into this. People tweeting at Netflix, Ikea, to which Ikea actually responded, saying, We're looking into this with YouTube to ensure these measures are working properly. We also saw Canada Goose and Fairlife issuing statements, essentially thanking people for bringing this to their attention and asserting that they are pausing their YouTube ads

until this issue is resolved. But you know, it brings up the question of, well, can YouTube actually fully sanitize the site in all ways? Right, in Matt's video he demanded that YouTube release the comments even further and to fix the algorithm so that it doesn't push this content so much. And so that brings up the question of is it actually possible for them to successfully do that? As you probably noticed, part of the content that we're talking about was uploaded for completely innocent reasons. And so that brings up the situation of, well, are we calling for the removal of videos that technically do not break any guidelines? But the video is brigaded by a bunch of disgusting monsters preying on children in the comment section. So in an effort to make the site better, are we calling for like anything that features a kid to be banned?

Also, are we then kind of calling for videos to not be recommended based off of the content of their comment sections? And once again, a lot of this would have to be related to the algorithm because there's just too much content being uploaded to YouTube at any given moment. Right, back in December, YouTube announced it was hiring 10,000 people to review content. But every minute, at least 300 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube. Right, so that means that every single hour, 18,000 hours of content is being added to the site. And understand, I'm not pointing this out because I'm like, YouTube doesn't need to do more. But I'm pointing it out to really highlight how hard of a problem YouTube has here.

Because there appears to be this incredibly anti-YouTube narrative, like YouTube doesn't care. Which in my opinion is just downright insane. There was another story this week where a channel got shut down because it was mistakenly thought to be involving child porn. And so YouTube was seen as the bad guys there because they were overly active

regarding this sort of content. And I think a comment from a YouTube spokesperson around that situation also feels connected to this other one. Regarding the account that was taken down mistakenly, they said, with the massive volume of videos on our site, sometimes we make the wrong call. And then adding, when it's brought to our attention that a video or channel has taken down mistakenly, they said, With a massive volume of videos on our site, sometimes we make the wrong call.

And then adding, when it's brought to our attention that a video or channel has been removed mistakenly, we act quickly to reinstate it. Alright, I think that touches on the scale issue. Also, on the note of YouTube comments, a YouTube spokesperson around this most recent issue said, Any content including comments that endangers minors is abhorrent and we have clear policies prohibiting this on YouTube. We enforce these policies aggressively, reporting it to the relevant authorities, removing it from our platform and terminating accounts. And adding, we continue to invest heavily in technology, teams and partnerships with charities to tackle this issue.

And according to The Verge, a statement from a YouTube spokesperson confirmed that several of the videos featured in Watson's video have since been removed. And so with all of that said, I think ultimately where I want to end this story, one, I and I imagine most all other people have a very, very big problem and are disgusted by some of the content that is on the site

I mean that both with videos that are clearly child exploitation and meant for the consumption of child predators as well as just the comment section of all of these predators helping one another out Two, there is not a doubt in my mind that YouTube is actively trying to combat this problem This narrative that YouTube doesn't care is stupid not because I I'm like, well, a company can't have morals, but because it hurts their bottom line. Every time they fail and a situation blows up like this and journalists are given this softball to go at YouTube's throat again, they will do it and then we see likes happening now. YouTube advertisers pulling back. And I mean at times they're so overactive trying to combat this stuff. I mean once again, you had a channel get shut down mistakenly. And also this video for example,

this video might not pop into a lot of people's recommended or their front pages because of what we're even talking about three I agree with nerd city who gave a comment to the verge saying that we just need to report report report YouTube can hire tens of thousands of people and still be completely understaffed to be able to deal with the issue But there are millions of us I think it's in our best interest to help YouTube take out the trash here and for I do agree that YouTube does need to Do a better job and I do agree that YouTube does need to do a better job, and I also think that YouTube agrees with that, which is why they're continuing to throw bodies

and money and trying to develop tech to better handle this. But with that said, that's the situation, some of my initial takeaways, and of course, I pass the question off to you. What are your thoughts around all of this? And that's where I'm going to end today's show. And remember, if you like this video, you like diving into the news together

with us every single day, let us know. Hit that like button. Also, if you're new here, you want more of these daily dives as well as the extra morning news videos hit subscribe and ring that bell Make sure you turn on those notifications to all also if you missed yesterday's Philip DeFranco show you want to catch up you missed this Morning's extra news deep dive you want to watch that you just click or tap right there to watch those lots with that said of course As always my name is Philip DeFranco. You've just been filled in I love yo faces, and I'll see you tomorrow