YouTube has banned a family of vloggers from its platform, after the parents were convicted of child neglect in the course of filming their popular “prank” videos.
Michael and Heather Martin,who post videos under the name FamilyOFive, were sentenced to five years of probation for child neglect in September last year, after viewers raised alarm over their treatment of their children in videos.
In one video, Michael Martin, posting as DaddyOFive, sprayed disappearing ink on the floor of his son’s bedroom, before calling him in and scolding him for it. As the son broke down in tears, Martin revealed the joke, telling him it was “just a prank.”
In another video, Martin instructed his children to slap his daughter in the face, prompting concern from other YouTubers. “The fact that a parent would say to themselves, ‘It’s OK for me to film my son slap my daughter and put it up on the Internet where she’s crying’,” one YouTube commentator said, “after I saw that clip today, those parents need to be in jail.”
The DaddyOFive account was hugely popular and generated millions of hits, and formed a core part of YouTube’s content aimed at children.
Following the conviction the Martins lost custody of two of their children, deleted all their videos from the DaddyOFive account – save one declaring the reports “fake” – and moved from Maryland to West Virginia with their remaining three children. There, as FamilyOFive, they continued to produce content, racking up a further with 176m views and 750,000 subscribers.
On Wednesday, however, YouTube closed the channel , as well as another channel run by the Martins that focused on gaming, and banned them from the site. “Content that endangers children is unacceptable to us,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
“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.”
The Martins gave a short statement to WUSA9, the local news station that led a campaign to ban them from the site and first reported on the account closure. They say: “Our family has worked very hard to heal and re-establish ourselves over the past 18 months. Through a lot of hard work and introspection, we are all doing well, and are happy.
“YouTube is something we enjoy as a family, and we will continue to do it, within the strict boundaries we have set for ourselves. For the sake of our privacy and continued healing, I have no further comment on anything past, or present at this time.”
The banning of the Martins may result in renewed calls for the regulation of YouTube – to protect its performers, as well as its viewers. “It is arguable that YouTube pranks need more regulation than those broadcast on TV,” wrote the New Statesman’s Amelia Tait after the DaddyOFive invisible ink video was posted.
“At present, there is no regulatory body that examines YouTube. Pranksters who break the law are arrested, but children whose daily lives are filmed for the site are not protected by the same regulations that safeguard child actors from being overworked or exploited. Though the communications authority Ofcom has guidelines about wind-up calls and consent, it does not regulate YouTube.”
