Yair Cohen: Indeed. Let's stop pretending that Google knew nothing about this type of fact. In fact, I will go further to say that YouTube or, in fact, Google, who owns YouTube, is completely responsible for the situation that places young children and even babies at risk. To understand Google's culpability we need to look at Google's age policy in relation to YouTube and in relation to Google's mobile phone operating system Android, which accounts to about 80 percent of new mobile phone sales. Starting with YouTube's age policy, this is very, very important and not many people understand this, Google officially says that YouTube users must be either 18 years old or 13 years old provided to have parents' permission to use YouTube. Of course, at the same time, Google promotes only videos, toys, other adverts, which are targeted at children much younger than 13 [years old]. Some of the videos and adverts are as clearly targeted at babies who are as young as 1 [year old]. Google knows very well that a huge amount of its users are under the age of 13; it knows this because it targets them with money-making adverts. But despite this, Google has persistently refused to install any form of parental control on either YouTube or on its Android system. In fact, to be able to use an Android mobile phone, Google says you must be 13 years old, but everybody knows that children as young as 4,5,6, 7, 8, 9, 10 [years old] have got mobile telephones and Google knows this as well. So these children, in order to be able to use the mobile phones, for the parents to allow the children to use the mobile phone, they must log in to the phone by creating a fake Google account, effectively faking the child's age, and Google cannot pretend that it doesn't know that there are children who are using its mobile phones. Now, what happens, because the parents have to put in a fake age, sometimes children do that, and then the child is being exposed to all sorts of risks on YouTube, including adult content, risks of grooming, pornography — all sorts of things. So, Google is effectively pretending that it has not got any users that are under 13 and therefore, there is no need to protect the children. And without parental controls on YouTube and on its Android phone system, Google is exposing those children, our children, to very serious harm [and] sexual, emotional [content], and you know what, sometimes even physical harm. Google is hiding behind its "over 13" policy, yet it lures children to come and watch baby stuff, to be manipulated by YouTubers. Now those YouTubers, we don't know who they are, they are being paid huge amounts of money by Google to promote videos, but Google knows that some of these YouTubers are targeting very young children. They sometimes manipulate them. Some of these YouTubers might be sex offenders, might be paedophiles, might be all sorts of people, they are not vetted at all. This is one of the greatest scandals of this century and I think that is absolutely correct and right for those companies to say: "you know what? We want nothing to do with you anymore". And it is a very courageous thing to do.
