According to a police report, an Arizona woman who used her seven adopted children to make videos for her highly popular monetized YouTube channel beat, locked up, starved, molested, and otherwise abused the children when they made mistakes, forgot lines, or failed to follow her direction properly. The children are also said to have alleged that they hadn't been to school in "years", and it seemed that most of their daily existence centered around making the videos.
Allegedly, despite the readily apparent malnourishment, one of the children even refused food offered by the police for fear of being punished by her mother later for eating it.
This case follows other recent incidents of child video "stars" being abused by parents and others looking to make cash using YouTube's video monetization schema. Earlier this month for instance, a UK man pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a young star for one of his video channels late last year, and after his arrest several other girls who starred in his various channels (all featuring young girls) described creepy and questionable behavior by him in retrospect. And in 2017, a Maryland couple lost custody of some of their children and were found guilty of neglect due to videos they made for their channel, which involved subjecting their children to cruel "pranks", even blaming them for nonexistent offenses and screaming profanity at them for extended periods of time, sometimes leading the kids to crying breakdowns or even wetting themselves.
All of the channels involved in these incidents were highly popular on YouTube, and their creators made substantial amounts of cash for them - the "prank" parents reportedly made "hundreds of thousands of dollars"; the "young girl video" channel network run by the child molester was more successful by an order of magnitude. Despite the amounts of cash involved, children used to make YouTube videos are not protected by the laws and industry standards that professional film and television studios are bound to comply with and there's no question that more kids are being exploited to various degrees for this easy money. Abuse as severe as that being alleged in the Arizona case is probably (well, hopefully) rare, but I would bet it's not completely a one-off.
Allegedly, despite the readily apparent malnourishment, one of the children even refused food offered by the police for fear of being punished by her mother later for eating it.
This case follows other recent incidents of child video "stars" being abused by parents and others looking to make cash using YouTube's video monetization schema. Earlier this month for instance, a UK man pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a young star for one of his video channels late last year, and after his arrest several other girls who starred in his various channels (all featuring young girls) described creepy and questionable behavior by him in retrospect. And in 2017, a Maryland couple lost custody of some of their children and were found guilty of neglect due to videos they made for their channel, which involved subjecting their children to cruel "pranks", even blaming them for nonexistent offenses and screaming profanity at them for extended periods of time, sometimes leading the kids to crying breakdowns or even wetting themselves.
All of the channels involved in these incidents were highly popular on YouTube, and their creators made substantial amounts of cash for them - the "prank" parents reportedly made "hundreds of thousands of dollars"; the "young girl video" channel network run by the child molester was more successful by an order of magnitude. Despite the amounts of cash involved, children used to make YouTube videos are not protected by the laws and industry standards that professional film and television studios are bound to comply with and there's no question that more kids are being exploited to various degrees for this easy money. Abuse as severe as that being alleged in the Arizona case is probably (well, hopefully) rare, but I would bet it's not completely a one-off.
via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/2HzjSbn
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