See No Evil

You never know where you'll land up on YouTube. You look at one video and they suggest related videos, which takes you in a new direction. Recently I watched a video of little kids meeting all the princesses at Disneyland.  I noticed the comments were turned off.  I wondered--did the parent do this?

So I viewed a number of these videos--there are quite a few on YouTube (there are quite a few of everything on YouTube)--and all of them seemed to have the comments turned off. Not that I wanted to make a comment, it just seemed a curious phenomenon.

I checked to see if this is some sort of new policy.  Sure enough, it is.  Last year, YouTube disabled comments on all videos featuring minors, apparently as a children's safety issue.

It's not the biggest deal, but I don't get it.  How does this protect children?  In fact, I assume the people who put out these videos are hoping to get comments on how cute their kids are.  Which is what they generally do get. There might be the occasional nasty comment, but how does that endanger children?