Based on a petition filed by a 24-year-old from Pune, YouTube was, on Thursday, forced to remove a child-abusing channel. The petitioner Tejeswani Naik has also written to other channels that are also broadcasting the offensive videos where students, in open schools, are forced to learn statements like “Your waifu is shit” and “Mani, is a lesbion fag”.
On November 17, Ms Naik posted a petition at change.org with a letter addressed to the CEO of YouTube Susan Wojcicki. These videos were apparently created by an Indian tuition teacher, for the channel Penorcut, where students are shown to be half-naked and are made to learn abusive statements like “I’m not gay, but $20 is $20” and “Adolf Hitler did nothing wrong”. Within three days of posting the petition online it gained over 29,500 supporters that forced YouTube to ban the channel.
“One day, while scrolling through YouTube, I came across to a video where a half naked child was making bizarre statements. When I clicked on the channel, I found several videos that startled me and I decided to act against them,” said Ms Naik to The Asian Age.
She had, on Thursday, filed an extended petition to Fiveer, a website that is still streaming the same videos and also charging $5 from customers for viewing them. “The same YouTube user has an account in Fiveer.
First, he started posting in this website then shifted to YouTube. And these websites charge money to show such videos. I have filed another petition to the CEO of Fiveer. It is shameful to see our children are being abused in the public domain,” said Ms Naik.
When a request is posted on YouTube to ban a video, several options pop out asking the reason for the ban. Ms Naik chose ‘child endangerment’ as the reason for banning the videos. But later, YouTube stated they did not find anything abusive in the videos and refused to ban them.
However, after the petition received over-whelming response on social media platforms and more people started to flag down the videos, they were taken off the site on Thursday.
