After a New York Times news report showed that YouTube’s content recommendation algorithm was pushing children’s videos to sexual predators, YouTube says it will take additional steps to protect kids on the video platform, including no live-streaming video from kids without adult supervision.
YouTube, which is owned by Google, today said it is banning live-streamed broadcasts by children “unless they are clearly accompanied by an adult.”
The video platform also has new artificial-intelligence classifiers for live video to “find and remove more of this content.”
YouTube channels that don’t follow the rules may lose the ability to livestream video, assuming YouTube actually follows through on any of this stuff.
“Responsibility is our number one priority, and chief among our areas of focus is protecting minors and families,” YouTube said in a blog post.
“With this update, we’ll be able to better identify videos that may put minors at risk and apply our protections” across a bigger segment of videos.
From Todd Spangler at Variety:
The Google-owned video platform, in a blog post Monday, also said it is limiting recommendations of videos that depict “minors in risky situations.” The updated policies come after YouTube in February announced that it would disable the ability to leave comments on nearly all videos featuring kids.
The announcement also comes in the wake of a New York Times report Monday, citing research that YouTube’s recommendation system has been suggesting videos of “prepubescent, partially clothed children” to users who had watched sexually themed content. According to YouTube, it has applied new restrictions to the algorithm-based recommendations system curbing recommendations of videos with minors to “tens of millions of videos.” However, it will continue recommending many videos with children because an all-out ban would hurt creators who rely on the recommendation engine to generate views, according to YouTube.