YouTube has announced today that they are increasing their efforts to protect minors and families. These updates expand their current policies that protect minors from being exploited on the popular streaming platform.

A statement on the YouTube site said: “We also enforce a strong set of policies to protect minors on our platform, including those that prohibit exploiting minors, encouraging dangerous or inappropriate behaviors, and aggregating videos of minors in potentially exploitative ways.” They added that in the first quarter of 2019, they removed more than 800,000 videos for violations of our child safety policies. The majority of these videos were taken down before they had 10 views.

The updates on YouTube’s safety policies for minors include restricting live features. They updated enforcement of our live streaming policy to specifically disallow younger minors from live streaming unless they are clearly accompanied by an adult. In addition, they have disabled comments on videos featuring minors to limit the risk of exploitation. They have also implemented a classifier that helped us remove 2 time the number of comments that violate policy. Finally, they have reduced recommendations. Earlier this year they limited recommendations of borderline content to include videos featuring minors in risky situations. These changes have already been applied to millions of videos across the platform.

The updated policies in place are in addition to YouTube investment in technology that helps protect minors. This includes CSAI Match technology as well as YouTube Kids, a platform for kids under 13 which allows kids to safely explore their interests and for parents to have more control.

Source: Read Full Article