
Better protecting kids’ privacy on YouTube - geddy
https://youtube.googleblog.com/2020/01/better-protecting-kids-privacy-on-YouTube.html
======
jedberg
This doesn't solve the number one problem of kids content on YouTube -- they
are leaving it up to the creator to decide if it's kids content. It's still
not human curated.

The nice thing about Netflix/Hulu/Amazon/PBS/etc. is that a human decides if
the content is for kids.

YouTube is still trying to get away with "letting the machines do it", which
works for most aspects of their business, but not this.

I used to let my kid watch YTKids while I supervised. But no more. Even with
my supervision it just jumps to some insanely inappropriate video, too quick
for me to shut it off in time, and it's already done damage.

When a scary clown jumps out and screams, that's traumatizing, even just for a
moment.

I have no trouble letting them watch all those other platforms. Heck, I let
them watch PBS unsupervised.

But YouTube Kids will never play in my house again until I know that _every_
piece of content on there has been reviewed by a human _before_ it goes live.

~~~
proc0
You can't compare Netflix/Amazon with Youtube. The amount of content YT must
deal with is multiple magnitudes larger. There is no way humans can handle
that much content, that quickly and accurately. They really don't have a
choice at that volume. Either machines learn to do it properly or there won't
be any filtering at all as humans wouldn't be able to keep up.

~~~
mbesto
> They really don't have a choice at that volume.

Crazy idea - maybe no one should be operating at that volume until they can
figure it out?

~~~
matz1
No, just because some kids are harmed so they should not operate at all? Thats
crazy.

~~~
taurath
Maybe you can't, as a corporation worth 100s of billions of dollars, put it
out there as being "for kids", if they don't want to pay to hire a legion of
people to deal with what they can't scale. They don't get to reap the benefits
and redistribute the costs.

~~~
bduerst
Corporations (billions in revenue or otherwise) are not good substitutes for
parenting.

If you don't want your kids on a product, then supervise them. Don't ban the
product for everyone who can use it responsibly.

~~~
taurath
Use it responsibly? Are you talking about people uploading creepy videos
targeted to kids, or like alcohol or something?

I'm certainly not one to say everything should be as safe as possible for
kids, but there's a limit to what a parent can reasonably be expected to
understand. If I set my kid up watching a blues clues clip, and look away for
30 seconds and he's seeing a clown with its arm torn off which autoplayed, I
feel like I'm reasonably kinda entitled to go hey wtf google, your shit is
broken and its harmed my kid.

And then, of course, not let my kid use youtube anymore.

------
akersten
Whatever the intent here was, it's having a completely bonkers outcome, and a
real chilling effect on content creators who have done no harm.

Content creators, who are not intending to target children with their videos,
are taking steps to ensure they're not ensnared by the onerous definitions the
FTC has given for "children's content." The FTC has indeed explicitly said
that the content creators, not YouTube, are responsible for flagging their
videos as "for kids," and the content creators are _personally_ liable to pay
a $40,000 fine if the FTC thinks they made a mistake [0]. So videos where
adults dress up in costumes, producing videos for other adults, but that a kid
might like? Yeah, they don't wear those costumes anymore, because the FTC
might consider it targeted-to-kids.

Meanwhile, actual garbage aimed specifically at children, like Elsa-gate and
animated shorts with instructions for viewers to commit suicide, go untargeted
by this non-fix.

[0]: [https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/the-
ftcs-2020-coppa-r...](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/the-
ftcs-2020-coppa-rules-have-youtube-creators-scared/)

~~~
fencepost
This is going to be ugly for people who do (did?) family-friendly content such
as a lot of gaming-related stuff. I'll use as an example Trainer Tips, which
is an intentionally noncontroversial channel about Pokemon Go.

As I understand it, if he marks his videos as being for kids, they end up
effectively demonetized and comments aren't allowed. If he doesn't mark them
as being for kids, he's at risk of massive fines. If he marks them as adults-
only (or just starts swearing or the like), they're also effectively
demonetized.

Guess this explains all the push by a lot of creators towards Patreon and the
like - the simple solution is to have your videos on YouTube marked as for
kids, but to push for people to support you on Patreon to get access to
discussions, a channel-specific Discord, etc. for the kinds of things that
would previously be in comments.

Edit: Oh, and no notifications when new kid-friendly content is posted, so if
you want notifications 'Support me on Patreon'

~~~
dilap
they’re just signing up to get fucked all over again if they move to patreon.

we need good decentralized platforms, no?

~~~
fencepost
It's not so much Patreon as some sort of outside discussion, notification and
possibly discovery platform with YouTube reduced to serving media instead of
discovery. That outside platform would likely need to be membership based or
paid, probably both, because that "paid" bit may provide a lot of cover
against children getting access - at least on the basis of T&C that say
something like "as part of this membership you agree to not allow access by
any persons under 13 and agree to cover fines and legal expenses we may incur
as a result of you violating these terms or as a result of collection
attempts."

That would be a combination of "get us in trouble and you're in it too" and
"as you can see Your Honor, we've made strong attempts to enforce keeping
children out of the community."

~~~
dilap
any centralized platform that gains significant traction will inevitably fuck
w/ some of its users for their own ends. i think as a creator either owning
the platform yourself (impractical for almost every1) or something
decentralized would be ideal. that way you don't give anyone a veto over your
destiny.

to replace youtube, it'd have to be both decentralized video delivery,
discovery, social as well as decentralized monetization -- which i think could
be patreon style or mayyyybe some sort of ad delivery.

not sure what legal ramfications would be exactly, but i certainly hope we
aren't in a place were otherwise-valid enterprises would be banned unless you
could (impossibly) prove kids weren't using it.

(also there have historically been lots of people making $ off providing
targeted-to-kids content (toy unboxing, slime videos, tasting candy, &c), and
it's not clear to me that's a bad thing...?)

------
Rebelgecko
Some of the features that get disabled for "children's content" are a bit
surprising:

Playback in the Miniplayer

Save to playlist and Save to watch later

Likes and dislikes on YouTube Music

Donate buttons

I guess it's hard to do these in a way that is compliant with the privacy
rules, or they're worried that kids will donate $1000 to their favorite
Youtuber with Mom and Dad's credit card? It will be interesting to see how
good their machine learning is at identifying "kid's content". From reading
the FTC page, the delineation seems a bit arbitrary. I suppose we'll see if
there's a financial impact on Youtubers that are borderline (is someone
playing a video game considered children's content? What if the videogame is
rated M? Will the tiebreaker be statistics about their actual viewers?)

~~~
vageli
I don't understand the prevention of adding to a playlist. Now I can't make a
custom playlist of children's content for my kid?

~~~
Slartie
Maybe this is intended to prevent "YouTube babysitting" aka "make a long
playlist, park kid in front of youtube, go and do something else"? Without the
ability to schedule up hours of content, one is forced to look after the child
regularly, even if it's just to start the next dull bit of entertainment.

Though if that was the motivation I'd expect them to also disable auto-play of
next video for content targeted at kids.

~~~
nomel
> Without the ability to schedule up hours of content, one is forced to

watch hours of YouTube recommended up-next videos!

------
TazeTSchnitzel
The suspicious thing is YouTube tries to detect _children 's content_, not
_users who are children_ … so this means YouTube is doing ad targeting on what
it believes to be children so long as they're not watching “children's
content”? Or such is the impression I got from this excellent essay about it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuScIN4emyo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuScIN4emyo)

~~~
pkaye
How would YouTube know the user is a child?

~~~
ronilan
Assume, just for the sake of the discussion, obviously, that it may be
possible, using some certain commonly accepted methods, and with some
reasonable, commonly accepted margin of error, to detect that a user, signed
into an account, is NOT a child.

Will this help?

~~~
danShumway
Depends on whether you're willing to tolerate false positives.

To start with, I'm not a huge fan of the idea that the Internet as whole could
be legally obligated to assume I'm a child unless I provide every site I visit
with a drivers license, for example.

But let's take your assumption to the next level: let's assume that there's
some privacy-respecting way of doing this (I don't believe there is, but we'll
temporarily pretend it exists).

I'm also not a huge fan of the idea that the Internet as a whole could be
legally obligated to assume I'm a child based on criteria that are outside of
my control. I personally think most of our experience with filters online have
taught us that they're best implemented close to the consumer, not close to
the source.

To be clear, both Youtube and the FTC are turning this into a dumpster fire.
But the idea of filtering content that's designed for children is better than
the idea of filtering consumers. It's just that this implementation of that
idea is garbage and unnecessarily hurts creators.

~~~
ronilan
Filtering? It’s a discussion about privacy....

(What content/functionality is available to what user is a different question,
and, I think we both agree, should be left for the provider to decide.)

(And I always find internet-as-whole arguments as a straw man. We are taking
about YouTube and Kids. Nothing more.)

~~~
danShumway
Youtube and Kids are making these decisions based on FTC requirements. The
FTC's rulings here have implications for the Internet as a whole.

> Filtering? It’s a discussion about privacy

The point being, there's no way to determine whether someone is an adult
without violating their privacy, and even if there was, the false positives
would be (imo) an unacceptable tradeoff. If you want to have a version of
COPPA that works without violating privacy, you have to focus on either
labeling or filtering content that's uploaded to a service. Trying to filter
users based on their age just doesn't work.

~~~
ronilan
Assume, just for the sake of the discussion, obviously, that it may be
possible to determine, without violating their privacy (and actually without
doing a damn thing), that someone might be a child?

Will this help?

(There’s an elephant in the room. All-of-internet wants it straw elephant out
(I think). The lawyers just got confused.)

~~~
danShumway
You will still have false positives. You will either have false positives in
that children will slip through, which the FTC is not a fan of. Or you will
have false-positives in that adults will be unfairly restricted (which
everyone else should have a problem with).

Even in that scenario, content filtering is more feasible and practical than
detecting and banning children.

But, pushing that problem aside as well, sure. Assuming that you didn't have
false positives, and assuming that you didn't have to violate anyone's
privacy, and assuming that the solution wasn't obscenely expensive, that
theoretical solution would be very helpful. It would basically solve the
entire problem, for pretty much everyone.

But that theoretical solution doesn't exist.

If we're willing to make those assumptions, I would also like a special gun
that only shoots bad people and doesn't work in schools or churches. And it
would be nice to give law enforcement with warrants access to lawful
information without requiring encryption backdoors. Of course, we'll also need
to implement the new training regiment that gets rid of any corrupt
prosecutors or officers.

I'll happily posit things for the sake of discussion, but there's a point
where I'm suspending so much reality that the discussion just breaks down. I
can't stop looking at the proposed solution and saying, "yeah but this thing
you're talking about _doesn 't work_." I guess I'm just not sure what you're
getting at.

~~~
ronilan
_”adults will be unfairly restricted”_ from what?

Asking for a friend.

~~~
danShumway
Let's say Youtube's theoretical solution labels you as a child, even though
you're not. Without some kind of way to get around that block, you've now lost
access to Youtube.

Note that this scenario isn't entirely theoretical. It's rare, but there are
already subsets of Youtube (trailers for horror movies are where I see this
most often) that are locked behind a login screen because the uploader has
indicated they're intended for mature audiences. You either log into Youtube
(sacrificing some privacy) or you just don't get access to those videos.

This ends up being not a huge problem today, because the amount of content
falling into that category is very narrow. Imagine a world where you fail
Youtube's theoretical privacy-preserving test, and suddenly you can't watch
anything, regardless of the content, that isn't designated as being
specifically directed at children.

Of course, on some level that's just Youtube's choice. But now imagine if a
government agency like the FTC dictates that every large Youtube-scale
platform has to implement this test. Suddenly you find yourself not only
unable to watch videos on Youtube, but also unable to make a Facebook/Twitter
account. Imagine if you can't search for certain things on Google.

Note that this final scenario also isn't _entirely_ theoretical with the FTC.
My reading of the comments that the FTC commissioner has made is that the
value of targeting Youtube is specifically that it's a centralized choke-point
for this kind of content. I don't see any reason to assume that if creators
migrate off of Youtube, that the FTC won't follow them and impose similar
rules wherever they end up.

~~~
ronilan
It’s about privacy not content.

(I have a lot to say about content, including suggesting specific solutions to
specific problems, but I’ve decided to not air this in a public forum. Further
discussion is pay gated. Sponsor me on github for more !!! :))

------
hartror
If you are interested in the FCC law/regs that brought about this change then
check out Legal Eagle's video covering the subject. Very detailed and well
presented, makes it clear that YT's hands are pretty tied on this matter.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3Q48dwopVU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3Q48dwopVU)

~~~
jedimastert
+1 to Legal Eagle in general.

He's had great coverage of all kinds of stuff (like the entire
impeachment...thing) in what I would consider a reasonably objective law-based
point of view (although IANAL). He also has very entertaining videos about
laws in movies and TV, like explaining all of the lawsuits and laws broken in
Jurassic Park.

------
lukejduncan
Tangential, and only kind of related, but a personal pet peeve -- I like
YouTube kids, but really dislike that half of the videos are "unboxings" of
toys. These aren't really ads, but man they act like them and they end up in
the recommended feeds kids see. There's also no way to get rid of them.
YouTube Kids has some of the best parental controls relative to other
streaming services, but this one ended up being a deal breaker for us.

~~~
lancesells
I'm not too familiar with kids content but I have seen some of those "unboxing
toy" videos are hosted by children themselves. I find it a bit concerning if
those videos are monetized. There are child labor laws but in the land of
Youtube do they apply at all?

I think this new law would at least get rid of parents monetizing their
children (as long as it's kids content).

~~~
whywhywhywhy
Found those sort of channels disturbing too, one of the highest paid YT ad
revenue stars is one such channel and companies pay around $50,000 outside of
that to have the child playing with their product for a few minutes. The kid
really doesn't look like he's that into it and kinda just going through the
motions.

Staring in videos is hard work and having a child act daily on camera for the
parents income can't be good for them.

------
facethrowaway
Until the richest YouTuber isn’t an adolescent set up to prey on his peers
with unboxing videos, these measures are all half-hearted attempts at keeping
the cash flowing. More regulation is probably needed.

~~~
dean177
> prey on his peers with unboxing videos

How is an unboxing video predatory?

~~~
mkl
Such videos are themselves ads, presented as if they're not.

~~~
angryasian
you say this like all cartoons growing up weren't giant ads. Almost every
cartoon of my generation was created by a toy company. He-Man, GI Joe,
Transformers, etc.

~~~
mkl
That's probably because I didn't watch cartoons growing up! But yes, I am
aware of that connection.

------
p1necone
This seems to presume that "childrens content" is a binary yes/no thing. This
is certainly not the case. I know as an adult I still watch many of the same
kinds of things I enjoyed as a kid.

I wonder if something like openly drinking alcohol on your channel, or having
scantily clad assistants or something could be a way to ensure you don't get
classed as childrens content.

~~~
drdeadringer
Off the top of my head:

A magician show. A circus performance. Summer Olympics.

Will some algorithm deem a full-body swim suit, or sparkling bikini outfit, or
an ad-laden sports bra as "not for children"?

What if my kid is into gymnastics, volleyball, swimming, stage magic more
complicated than Blues Clues and Smiley The Clown?

Will I get my entire Google existence snuffed if I log in as myself and let
the kid watch anyway?

As an adult, will I no longer be allowed to watch clips from "Legend Of Korra"
[an example]?

~~~
p1necone
The obvious solution to me is to just ask users how old they are. Parents
should be supervising enough to do this for their young kids. Maybe let you
lock an age restricted account logged in.

If you're not supervising enough to notice your kid clearing history/cookies
to get "adult" access then that's on you. It's not clear to me that youtube
should be expected to police this very strongly, especially when sites like
pornhub or liveleak are a few keystrokes away.

~~~
dodobirdlord
They do/have. You have to be 13+ to make an account. This was apparently not
enough to avoid a $170 million dollar fine [0] and now it's apparently time
for absurdly vague but extremely threatening regulatory guidance [1]. Doesn't
seem like there is much option at this point other than massive disaster
response.

[0] [https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-
releases/2019/09/googl...](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-
releases/2019/09/google-youtube-will-pay-record-170-million-alleged-
violations)

[1] [https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-
blog/2019/11/...](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-
blog/2019/11/youtube-channel-owners-your-content-directed-children)

------
ravenstine
Unpopular Opinion: There shouldn't be "children's content" on YouTube in the
first place.

~~~
arwineap
Can you explain how it's different than children's content on TV?

~~~
ravenstine
It's a monopolized medium trying to reconcile the concept of people uploading
their own videos with the idea that children should only watch safe content. I
don't believe it's a good idea in the first place and it leads to rules that
can be misapplied to content creators.

------
mdorazio
While this is good, am I missing something or is there no incentive for bad
actor content creators to actually mark their content as for kids now? I’m
under the impression that the recommendation algorithm would probably still
point kids to a lot of the creepy garbage on there now.

~~~
Kalium
[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/01/youtube-
decides-...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/01/youtube-decides-its-
easier-to-treat-all-watchers-of-kids-content-as-kids/)

> Individual video creators themselves are also now personally on the hook for
> penalties of up to $42,350 if they fail to explicitly mark their videos as
> for children, the FTC said in November. This draws concern from creators who
> consider their content family-friendly but not necessarily child-directed.

The Google blog doesn't go into it, but there are potentially significant
fines attached.

~~~
bscphil
I can think of all sorts of interesting cases here. As _art_ , it's perfectly
acceptable to remix clips from different children's shows together to make the
characters swear or put them in otherwise inappropriate situations.

If I made something like this, I would mark it as targeted at adults. Because
it _is_ targeted at adults, it's not meant for children. But if bright colors
and recognizable characters in the automatically generated thumbnail attracted
a child audience, would I be on the hook with the FTC?

The bad actors here are doing something similar, but they're deliberately
trying to attract children to their videos. It's understandable to hope they
get nailed by the FTC for this, but it seems (to me) to require discerning
intent, which is always hard.

~~~
zozbot234
You could mark it as NSFW content, specifically to prevent kids from watching
it. A bit of a blunt solution, but then no one sane would argue that you're
"targeting" kids!

~~~
derefr
YouTube has a (system-level) way to mark content as NSFW?

~~~
jedimastert
There is a system for "Mature Content". This generally means age restriction,
absolutely no monetization, and pretty serious de-buffs to search results.

~~~
wayoutthere
Sounds like the problem is YouTube is trying to have their cake and eat it too
-- in my opinion, content should either be "adults only" with whatever ads or
"family friendly" with only untargeted ads.

Less targeting of ads in general would be a good thing. YouTube makes the
rules around monetization and ad rates on their platform, so they just need to
rework their business model to, you know, not exploit children.

------
ineedasername
I think identification of what constitutes kid's content, or content
predominantly viewed by people under the legal drinking age if 21, is really
borked.

To provide one example of many, my son (under 12) likes a channel Dope or
Nope. It's sort of a quick drive-by review of a bunch of products that share a
theme, but they are almost always toys, games, or gadgets that skew to a
younger audience. And yet it's not uncommon for alcohol-based ads to appear.
Which, just, no, not at all okay.

Do YouTubers have any control over this? Or is it purely in the domain of The
Algorithm?

~~~
alfalfasprout
...and your 12 year old is going to develop a drinking problem because of
watching an ad?

This is what's wrong with America... in many other countries beer ads are
everywhere and you don't see children brown-bagging a beer in the playground.

~~~
ineedasername
Who said anything about a drinking problem? But ads that glorify and make
drinking seem exotic/cool/whatever can normalize underage drinking, or any
activity for that matter: maybe you're aware of the massive vaping craze among
the young, partly as a result of viral social media that does that same thing.
Don't act like media exposure can't have any impact on expectations, social
norms, and the like. And take notice of the fact that in the 80s and 90s when
awareness of this sort of advertising issue curtailed such advertising in
traditional media, things like incidents of drunk driving and related
accidents/deaths began their years-long decline.

------
hirundo
There's a certain immunity to ads that we develop over time. To the extent
that we protect kids from them we could make them more vulnerable to them.
Like a peanut allergy. I bought crap when I was a kid based on cheesy ads in
the back of magazines. One was a Real Submarine for $5. Spoiler, it wasn't a
real submarine. That's a good lesson to learn before you go shopping for cars
and houses.

~~~
kibwen
On the other hand, it's also good to demonstrate to children that advertising
is not some utterly inevitable and inescapable phenomenon, and that an
experience without ads can possibly exist (and is more pleasant to boot).
Don't just teach your kids to ignore ads; teach them to explicitly recognize
their mentally-manipulative properties and outright _oppose_ ads.

~~~
hirundo
> teach them to explicitly recognize their mentally-manipulative properties

The most effective way to teach them that is to let them spend their own hard-
saved money on stuff-they-really-want-that's-actually-garbage. To do that they
need to be exposed to the minor league con artists behind so many ads.
Anything short of that will be mere theoretical knowledge, inconsistently
applied.

~~~
kibwen
I don't think that's enough, because not all advertisements seek an immediate
purchase. Furthermore, learning the explicit levers in your brain that
marketing execs seek to pull can then be usefully applied to becoming more
cognizant of implicit manipulation elsewhere, such as in the case of political
propaganda. Theoretical knowledge should be applied in addition to first-hand
experience; there's no need for people to reinvent all this from scratch
solely for the sake of experiential learning. Even without ads on children's
content on YouTube, I'm not at all concerned about a child's ability to
thoroughly experience advertising in their formative years.

------
sjc27
this is a leap, but I hope we get to a point where kids are afforded some
basic privacy rights that protect them from parents who, intentionally or not,
exploit their kids on social media.

------
annoyingnoob
I made my kids stop watching YouTube. Problems solved. This is what happens
when the content on your platform is almost entirely crap. YouTube is like the
sewer and I don't let my kids play in the sewer either.

~~~
robbrown451
I'd argue YouTube is more like a city. It's got its sewers, and it's got its
seedy areas, but it also has its museums.

~~~
mc3
It's a city where you are teleported into the sewer, and you have to click
back or close to get out of it again, but you've still smelt the sewer.

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
I don't know what YouTube y'all are using. The recommendations on my end are
pretty great. Gaming replays from my favorite video game, woodworking videos,
cooking videos, the latest piece from Jonathan Blow, a review of Blade Runner
2048, a video about gardening, and some Star Wars criticism. Ten videos above
the fold that exactly suit my interests, any one of which I'd probably be
happy to watch, and some of which might even be edifying.

------
yellow_lead
> To help us identify made for kids content, in November we introduced a new
> audience setting in YouTube Studio to help creators indicate whether or not
> their content is made for kids.

So, in November they asked you to say if your video was made for kids. They
likely had this intention, but wanted to first collect the data they needed
voluntarily. If I were a content creator that self-identified their videos as
for children, I would be angry. This just goes to show the unexpected and
against-your-interest things companies will do with your data.

~~~
gundmc
They announced that they would stop showing targeted ads against this content
"in 4 months" back in September [1].

[1] - [https://youtube.googleblog.com/2019/09/an-update-on-
kids.htm...](https://youtube.googleblog.com/2019/09/an-update-on-kids.html)

------
wyoh
How do you determine what is kids content and what is not? Is a Pewdiepie
video on Minecraft qualify as kids content?

------
koonsolo
For parents withs kids who like Pepa Pig, watch out for some nasty videos on
YouTube. It's hard to make the distinction between the official one, and your
kid doesn't need to see how pepa pig gets eaten by a dinosaur.

I wonder if these "parodies" will be correctly labeled by their authors.

------
acd
Remember the scissors cut the eye of toy doll recommendation video when my
kids watched video on youtube. After that only supervised youtube watching.
The recommendation algorithm is made to keep people hooked coming for more
content.

------
info781
Now they have to move kids programming off of regular YouTube, so kids will
not go on there.

------
ping_pong
I think this is overall better, but will this disincentivize people from
creating good children's content? My kids have learned things like American
Presidents and Astronomy from decent videos on Youtube kids.

~~~
angryasian
They can still make ad money, just not targetted ad money. The reality is that
if theres money to be made someone will do it. Youtube is just another
marketing channel, they'll be able to move into merchandising and other money
making option

------
fma
Here's my solution. Purchase PBS shows and stream at home. On the road, a DVD
player with PBS shows.

Daughter is only 3.5...lets see how long it works.

~~~
gundmc
Sesame Street is on HBO now, just let her loose on the HBO vod library, what's
the worst that could happen?

------
drdeadringer
... is this retroactive?

Say I have any number of videos uploaded to YouTube. Do I have to devote so
much time for this new "(not) for kids" flag?

------
sergiotapia
Good, now where will all these elsagate creeps flock to? Youtube had this
stink about it for years, hopefully they can wash it off.

------
ourcat
Some kids (and their parents) are making a fortune on YouTube with kids
content.

I can't imagine they'll be too pleased.

------
BelleOfTheBall
Literal 'baby steps', hah. The fact that they disable 'save' features might be
because they don't want it to mess with their statistics, I guess? Like, they
want to see how many people are leaving stuff to watch/rewatch later or
something like that. Do they track that?

The rest makes a lot of sense and I'm glad that something is being done.

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MisterBastahrd
Good. Most kids' content on Youtube is nothing more than long infomercials for
products anyway. If that section (and the political sections) of the site
could be rolled into a ball and launched into the sun, the world would be a
better place.

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duxup
How about just no ads on children's content...at all?

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mkl
As far as I can tell, most "children's content" on YouTube _is_ thinly
disguised ads. My nieces watch it, then play pretend "making a video" showing
off products and "unboxing", and want to buy the things they see.

~~~
duxup
Not far off outside obvious non ad content like Sesame Street and such.

I gave it a run curating stuff for my kids....gave up and YouTube is simply
off limits now.

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jeandejean
I'm surprised it was even possible until now...

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tomaszs
Fingers crossed that it also means 99% of YT ads budget wont be spent on baby
clicks.

