“Hi, internet friends. There is a paedophile ring on YouTube.”
So starts a five-minute-long video by YouTuber ReallyGraceful, a romance author who makes tri-weekly videos “diving down the rabbit hole of truth”. ReallyGraceful created her video after a Reddit post claimed that child pornography could be found on YouTube if a user searched the words “Webcam video from”.
Since then, many big name YouTubers have followed suit in trying to expose an alleged paedophile ring on the site. Last week, Pyrocynical, a British YouTuber with over one and a half million subscribers, created a video called “Child Exploitation on YouTube”, discussing “Webcam video from” videos of children twerking or filmed from sexually suggestive angles, many of which had accumulated millions of views and hundreds of predatory comments. He notes that none of the videos contained actual nudity.
“This is essentially softcore child porn,” he says in the video, before later adding: “YouTube has the ability to crack down on this shit but they choose not to.”
If you search “Webcam video from” on YouTube today, no such videos will be found. YouTube relies on a system of users and “trusted flaggers” to highlight videos that violate its policies, and it appears that, after the videos were exposed by top YouTubers, the content has been removed.
“YouTube has a zero-tolerance policy for sexual content involving minors,” a YouTube spokesperson says. “Engaging in any type of activity that sexualises minors – including leaving inappropriate comments – will immediately result in an account termination. We encourage users to flag videos or comments for our review.”
Although it is apparent that some sexually suggestive content was hosted on YouTube, and that predators also aggregated innocent videos of children, is there any truth to rumours that “Webcam video from” is a secret code for paedophiles, and that a ring – which is to say, a group of people acting together to find, upload, and share the content – is operating on the site?
YouTube’s “webcam capture” feature was discontinued at the beginning of 2016, but it previously allowed users to upload content directly from their webcams which would then be titled “Webcam video from” followed by the date and time. Most of these videos were innocent, though it is apparent from comments posted on such videos – with the “Webcam video from” title – that predators used the search term to find content of children. Accusations that paedophiles downloaded, reuploaded and monetised these videos are hard to prove or disprove, though it is possible, considering how long such videos were left up. Most of these videos were – before they were removed – a few years old, and the trend seems to be an obsolete one that was only discovered recently.
Comments from “Webcam video from” videos, via Imgur
This wouldn’t be the first time that paedophilic activity has been discovered on YouTube. Last April, a spate of “mummy vloggers” stopped filming their children after discovering that their videos were embedded into paedophilic playlists on the video-sharing site.
“Before the internet, someone with a sexual interest in children had to take lots of risks,” Karl Hopwood, a member of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety, told me at the time. “They needed to loiter near schools, go to the beach or park. Now, they can browse huge amounts of content from the privacy of their own homes, and no one knows they have done it.”
It is clear, then, that predatory users can abuse YouTube to find, aggregate, and share content of children, but the term “paedophile ring” muddies the story slightly. The phrase implies some sort of organisation or central power, and ReallyGraceful connected it to “Pizzagate”, the conspiracy theory, favoured by some Donald Trump supporters, that a pizza shop in Washington DC is a front for a Democratic paedophile ring visited by Hillary Clinton.
“You can say all day that this has nothing to do with Pizzgate but clearly it has everything to do with Pizzagate because there is a paedophile ring out in the freaking open on YouTube,” she said in her video.
ReallyGraceful also uses her channel to spread stories about “#TwitterGate”, an alleged paedophile ring on Twitter. “The story that broke this morning involves the very platform that was trying to supress Pizzagate,” she says in her video on the topic. In her video about YouTube’s “paedophile ring” she says: “The second one of us uploads a Pizzagate video to YouTube, we get flagged for some ridiculous reason.” ReallyGraceful voted for Trump and has previously created videos questioning Barack Obama’s birth certificate.
The rhetoric of “paedophile rings” has been seized as a political tool by some US right-wingers to argue for their cause, as well as attack their enemies and generate hysteria about the need to “drain the swamp”. This new-found trend of “exposing” paedophile rings and using this exposure to bolster one’s own political beliefs can obscure legitimate concerns about children’s online safety. While predators may in the past have used YouTube to prey on children, the sensationalism of a handful of professional YouTubers in telling the story has obscured a real and important issue.
If you identify troubling content on YouTube, click the flag underneath the video or the three dots next to the comment in question. A staff of specialists monitor all reports 24/7 and will take action to remove any offending content. If you are concerned about a child’s online safety, you can find advice or make a report to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre at: ceop.police.uk.
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