YouTube steps up protection for kids
LOS ANGELES – You may have stumbled onto some questionable kids videos on YouTube or heard that some seemingly kid-friendly videos were acting as chat rooms for predators.
As a parent, you’ll need to become a lot more involved in what your kid watches to make sure they keep off the nasty underbelly of YouTube — even with the Google-owned unit’s recent commitment to do a better screening job.
This week, YouTube said it turned off comments on 625,000 videos and deleted 150,000 videos that were “targeted by child predators.”
Remember that YouTube receives 400 hours of new submitted video every minute, and humans don’t curate what’s coming in. Google only responds after videos are flagged with complaints.
But parents can act to clean up the YouTube experience at home with several simple steps: Add a restrictive filter. Go to the Settings section of YouTube (click your icon, top right, and click Settings) and enable the restrictive filter, which Google says will make for a safer, family friendly experience. However, in the past the filter has been accused of going too far and also blocking out nonsexual videos with lesbian and gay themes. Disable recommended videos. This is important, because even Google notes that with its endless loop of suggested videos based on your watch history, “sometimes your child may find content in the app that you may not want them to watch.”
Use an ad blocker. You may be uncomfortable with your kids seeing an endless array of sugared cereal and toy ads with their videos. You can pay YouTube $10 monthly for a subscription to ad-free YouTube Red, or use an adblocker.
Get the YouTube Kids app. YouTube designed the mobile app as a safer place for kids under 12 and says some 11 million use it monthly. The videos chosen are based on the age of the viewer, but some questionable
content has slipped through the cracks. (YouTube says it’s less than 1%.) Like with the Web YouTube, go to Settings to enable restrictive mode.
On YouTube Kids, unlike regular YouTube, a parent cannot enable restricted mode. Parents can turn off search and give their kids access to a more limited set of videos. Parents can also set up specific profiles for their kids.
❚ Disable search. You choose the videos your kids watch.
❚ Create playlists. On YouTube, it’s easy to pull as many as 50, if not more, parent-approved cartoons into one playlist, a collection that will never be infiltrated by rogue content. To create a playlist, click the + sign underneath a video for “Add to.” Click create a playlist, name it, and then start curating content for your kids this way. Create multiple playlists for your kids, and you’re now a programmer. ❚ Remember that YouTube’s not
for kids. Really. Despite kids programming being the most popular category on YouTube (four of the top five U.S. channels feature kid content, according to Tubular Labs), YouTube says the channel is for teens and adults only.
“If you are under 13 years of age, then please do not use the Service,” YouTube says. “There are lots of other great websites for you. Talk to your parents about what sites are appropriate for you.”