YouTube terminates accounts of users whose content represents child abuse

Last year in September, YouTube parents — the FamilyOFive — who are infamous for ruthlessly pranking their children on videos, were sentenced to five years of probation for child abuse. The parents, Mike and Heather Martin, also lost custody of two of their three children, for using the two children to create a viral video.However, despite all of those charges on the parents, their YouTube account continued to be active, and the parents were still putting up the abusive videos.Consequently, activists and other users were insisting that YouTube take action against the FamilyOFive account and other such similar ones.Popular YouTuber Philip DeFranco also created a video talking about the abusive parents. YouTube has since pulled down the account for good. “Content that endangers children is unacceptable to us. We have worked extensively alongside experts in child safety to make sure we have strict policies and are aggressively enforcing them. Given this channel owner’s previous strikes for violating our Guidelines prohibiting child endangerment, we’re removing all of his channels under our Terms of Service,” YouTube told a US news channel. At the time of writing the story, when we searched FamilyOFive on YouTube, we could still see the thumbnails of some of their videos, clicking on them played nothing, with just a warning that read that the account was no longer active.The Martins insisted that most of their videos featured their children alone, and mostly their youngest child, who is about 10 years old. However, the parents were the ones orchestrating these videos, playing violent pranks on their kids, with evidence of their children sustaining injuries sometimes while shooting these videos.This, of course, was widely condemned by members of the YouTube community, who say that the Martins were monetising child abuse and exploitation.