C.D. Reimer

After news broke that pedophiles were using time codes in comments to tag “sexually suggested” content in family friendly videos on YouTube, I kept a close watch on my only video with young children in a musical performance at a public event that had previously attracted the wrong kind of audience six months earlier.

After I saw the initial traffic spike for the video while watching the real time analytics for my channel at 5:30PM on Friday, February 22, 2019, I disabled the comment section for that video as a precaution.

I went to the tech news website that my dedicated band of trolls called home and located the video URL in an anonymous comment for an article about YouTube’s latest child safety problem. Readers were asked to report me as a pedophile because a little boy had his “peewee” hanging out at a specified time code in the video.

The video shows a little boy with his hands over the front of his t-shirt and the waistband of his shorts while running around.

One comment called the anonymous comment a perfect example of the nonsense that the YouTube community is struggling with. Another comment told the troll to get psychiatric help.

After I sent an email to the CEO of the tech news website at 5:45PM, the entire thread got deleted 15 minutes later. The traffic spike ended with 14 new views for the video. Each view represents a person who wanted to see a little boy with his “peewee” handing out, either out of curiosity that such content exist or hopeful that such content was real.

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