YouTube Just Banned All Minors From Streaming Unless Accompanied By An Adult

YouTube has really been trying to clean up its act lately. After the whole Momo scare we all saw a few months ago, and some really unfortunate things happening in their algorithm, they have decided to ban everyone under the age of 13 from live streaming on their service.

GOOD.

With Video Game Addiction on the rise. So much more needs to be done!

YouTube released a statement on their blog where they said, “We updated enforcement of our live streaming policy to specifically disallow younger minors from live streaming unless they are clearly accompanied by an adult.

Channels not in compliance with this policy may lose their ability to live stream.

We also launched new classifiers (machine learning tools that help us identify specific types of content) on our live products to find and remove more of this content.”

They’ve taken some HUGE steps to not only ban “younger minors” as they call them from streaming, but are also turning off the commenting on videos that feature kids that age as well.

They also said, “We disabled comments on tens of millions of videos featuring minors across the platform, to limit the risk of exploitation. Additionally, we implemented a classifier that helped us remove 2x the number of violative comments.

We recognize that comments are a core part of the YouTube experience and creators have told us they feel we removed a valuable way for them to connect with and grow audiences.

But we strongly believe this is an important step to keeping young people safe on YouTube.”

But that isn’t everything they’re doing they are also working hard to keep these videos featuring young kids from being recommended alongside inappropriate ones.

They said, “We expanded our efforts from earlier this year around limiting recommendations of borderline content to include videos featuring minors in risky situations.

While the content itself does not violate our policies, we recognize the minors could be at risk of online or offline exploitation.

We’ve already applied these changes to tens of millions of videos across YouTube.”

It’s nice to see YouTube stepping up and taking some responsibility. But this also needs to be on the parents. Young children should have no expectation of privacy on the internet, and need to be monitored very closely.