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YouTube channel owners: Is your content directed to children?

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Re: YouTube channel owners: Is your content directed to children?

#21
post #13

How did youtube manage to convince the ftc that their practice of illegally surveilling minors is somehow the fault of youtube users? Doesn't every youtube user provide their age when they make an account? Shouldn't youtube have some kind of predicate like "if child doNotTrack"? I think google might be committing libel here. Claiming their users violate coppa when their users can't even control who google does or doe…

Youtube doesn't allow you to create an account if you select an age that would make you a child. But you don't need an account to watch youtube.

If you are watching youtube without an account then you are not posting comments. (The FTC article gives a specific example of a child posting a comment as being a disclosure of personal information.) Where is any tracking or collection of data whatsoever controlled by the channel host in cases of people viewing without an account?

If the child DOES post a comment, then that means they lied to YouTube about their age when signing up for an account. Why is this a channel host's legal responsibility, and what possible measures could be implemented to avoid it other than requiring an identity disclosing internet drivers license to be presented before each use of the internet.

Re: YouTube channel owners: Is your content directed to children?

#22

I'm really not fond of rules that force you to make black and white decisions on things that are inherently in shades of gray. I watch a lot of stuff with my 5 year old daughter -- whether on YouTube or elsewhere -- than we both seem to equally enjoy. Recent ones include Star Wars Resistance, The Mandalorian, Spirited Away, From Up on Poppy Hill, The Incredibles 2. On YouTube we watch "how it's made" videos, as well…

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Re: YouTube channel owners: Is your content directed to children?

#23
99% of channel owners producing content for children know their market includes children; the other 1% are lying. This gives Youtube's army of annotators better basis to flag the liars. Not just that the content is directed to children, but that they are liars.

Re: YouTube channel owners: Is your content directed to children?

#24

The proposed new rules might mean an over 50% cut in revenue to a channel possibly driving the smaller players out. Very interesting side effects of regulations.

And the price of food is higher than the theoretical lower limit because we require FDA and USDA inspections. This prevents some number of Americans from opening "mom-and-pop" grocery stores.

I'll take the regulations, thanks.

Re: YouTube channel owners: Is your content directed to children?

#25

I'm really not fond of rules that force you to make black and white decisions on things that are inherently in shades of gray. I watch a lot of stuff with my 5 year old daughter -- whether on YouTube or elsewhere -- than we both seem to equally enjoy. Recent ones include Star Wars Resistance, The Mandalorian, Spirited Away, From Up on Poppy Hill, The Incredibles 2. On YouTube we watch "how it's made" videos, as well…

There are a few guidelines but the FTC also has a general audience category.

Youtube is ignoring this and forcing a choice because it's easier to implement. They're also ignoring creators that are asking for age-gating with logged-in users only to prevent their video classification from being contested in the future.

Re: YouTube channel owners: Is your content directed to children?

#26
post #13

How did youtube manage to convince the ftc that their practice of illegally surveilling minors is somehow the fault of youtube users? Doesn't every youtube user provide their age when they make an account? Shouldn't youtube have some kind of predicate like "if child doNotTrack"? I think google might be committing libel here. Claiming their users violate coppa when their users can't even control who google does or doe…

Youtube doesn't allow you to create an account if you select an age that would make you a child. But you don't need an account to watch youtube.

Not just a account, youtube requires a age of 13+ (in US) to be used at all as far as I know. This normally would have safely removed any legal problems as a parent allowing the child (The problem as far as I have heard was that youtube realized that there are a lot of to young (The problem with the FTC requiring content producers for youtube (13+) to label videos as "for kids" is that with the FTC rules a lot of videos which are not meant for kids and are never supposed to be delivered to kids now fall under this label and lose targeted advertisement money, which can be there major income.

E.g. there are a bunch of channels doing LEGO reviews for _adults_ (because surprise there are a lot of young adults which started to like LEGO again, parents and also that cray people thinking it's a good money investment). Now because they do LEGO reviews they will have to label this as a kids thing, even through the amount of kids on their channels is less then 2%.... Or basically any easy to understand since video gets practically demonetized, because it's naturally interesting for 12y olds and has nice animations etc. This videos are fine to be seen by kids, but the producers would prefer kids to be excluded as they need to earn money to at least cover production cost.

Also because officially there are not Also we should not forget that there is YT for kids, so if you produce (good) content targeted at kids this is where you should go.

So it's a pretty messed up situation. If you now consider who has very large influence over the FTC and who either hates the modern internet which made people stop watching classical cable, or would like to additional bill YT (more?) etc. it's doesn't seem likely to resolve in a reasonable way, at last I would be surprised. But then I have been surprised before so let's hope it ends not to bad.

Re: YouTube channel owners: Is your content directed to children?

#27
How Youtube is handling this is a major failure. Even if creators say their videos aren't for kids, they can still be contested, overruled and fined.

A proper solution is to create an age-gate for videos with categories of kids only, older-only, and general audience (which is allowed by the FTC). Also stop tracking tracking anonymous users.

This would allow creators to categorize content without losing all monetization and features, or risking legal action. That would be more expensive to implement though so it's not happening.

Re: YouTube channel owners: Is your content directed to children?

#29

I'm really not fond of rules that force you to make black and white decisions on things that are inherently in shades of gray. I watch a lot of stuff with my 5 year old daughter -- whether on YouTube or elsewhere -- than we both seem to equally enjoy. Recent ones include Star Wars Resistance, The Mandalorian, Spirited Away, From Up on Poppy Hill, The Incredibles 2. On YouTube we watch "how it's made" videos, as well…

Additionally, people who are targeting kids will almost definitely classify theirs as kid-safe. This is not going to help anyone. Unless parents are willing to take off these devices from their kids they will discover these videos in 5 video watches.

> people who are targeting kids will almost definitely classify theirs as kid-safe.

That's the goal - if this is checked by the creator (for the specific video or for the entire channel), it will have personalized ads disabled for the video plus disable whatever tracking systems Google has for regular watching.

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