When Allison Irons uploaded a YouTube video of her newborn baby wearing a reusable nappy, she knew 13,000 strangers would be watching. She had built up a respectable number of subscribers during her five years “mummy vlogging”, and knew to tag her video with the words “cloth diaper” to help other parents in need of advice. “I never in a million years suspected that same tag could be used for evil,” she said later.
On 3 March, Irons deleted all traces of her children from her channel, The Life of a Homemaker. Using YouTube’s analytic tools, she discovered that videos of her children had been embedded on paedophile websites and featured on suspect playlists on YouTube itself. Often hundreds of videos long, the playlists collate footage of children wearing nappies, breastfeeding and in the bath.
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