YouTube Bans Comments on Videos Featuring Kids
YouTube announced that it will ban comments on most videos featuring children. What does this mean for family vloggers?
YouTube are shutting down comments on videos for children under 18 years old to better protect children and families. Obviously, this will have a serious impact on many video producers.
Why does YouTube disable comments on videos featuring children? Here is a video on the child exploitation scandal that is now ripping through YouTube. This is making advertisers very jumpy.
The world is watching YouTube to actively address the issue, and they have confirmed that they are taking drastic measures to protect children who appear in videos uploaded to one of the world’s largest social media platforms.
More than a week after the child exploitation story broke, YouTube finally posted an update on its creator’s blog page. In this article, they summarize what they have done so far, but more importantly, what they plan to do next. That’s where video makers are starting to feel a little uncomfortable.
YouTube says it has blocked tens of millions of video comments in the past week that could have been subject to predatory behavior. These efforts have focused on videos featuring young and older minors. The platform will continue to identify videos at risk in the coming months.
YouTube also confirmed that it has been working to create a more effective classifier that can identify and automatically remove comments deemed predatory, creepy or harmful. As part of their overall security policy, they are actively removing content that attempts to harm or endanger children and terminating channels.
YouTube also confirmed that a small number of family-friendly and child-friendly creators will be able to keep comments enabled on such videos. However, these selected channels need to actively review the comments using the standard moderation tools, and the comments must show low-risk predatory behavior.
While YouTube claims to have only a small number of creators, we can assume that it is probably the largest creators on the platform, ones that generates tens of millions of views. And these creators will have to prove that their comments are safe.
Read also: 2 Ways to Comment on a YouTube Video Quickly and Easily.
YouTube’s New Comment Policy: How Will It Work?
The new policy confirms that tens of millions of videos and millions of video creator channels will be banned from commenting.
These creators will no longer be able to interact directly with their audience, which will change the whole dynamic of how they build an engaged audience and community on YouTube.
For the few selected channels that can keep comments enabled, how will they work with YouTube, and how much work will these channels and YouTube teams need? If we’re talking about some of the biggest child-friendly properties, each uploaded video can bring in more than 10K comments, and tweaking that number will require a lot of hard work.
Bottom Line
That’s all the information about “why does YouTube disable comments on videos featuring children”. In addition, this article also shows you the efforts YouTube are doing to better protect children and families.