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YouTube’s new kids’ content system has creators scrambling
YouTube’s new kids’ content system has creators scrambling. The government could sue them for thousands of dollars
On Tuesday afternoon, YouTube formally announced its plan to have creators label any videos of theirs that may appeal to children.
Starting in January 2020, if creators mark a video as directed at kids, data collection will be blocked for all viewers, resulting in lower ad revenue, and those videos will lose some of the platform’s most popular features, including comments and end screens.
It’s a major change in how YouTube works, and has left some creators clueless as to whether they’re subject to the new rules.
Reached by The Verge, Google confirmed that this new system was the result of a landmark $170 million settlement YouTube reached with the Federal Trade Commission in September for allegedly violating children’s privacy.
It’s the largest fine ever collected under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which forbids collecting data from children under the age of 13 without explicit consent from their parents.
In this case, the ruling means YouTube can’t employ its powerful ad-targeting system on anyone who might be under the age of 13 — a dire problem for a platform with so many young users.“IT’S HARD TO KNOW IF WE’RE IN VIOLATION OR NOT”
The new system is already sending creators reeling over what exactly is considered kids’ content and what could happen if they unintentionally mislabel videos. Some of YouTube’s most popular categories falls into a gray area for the policy, including gaming videos, family vlogging, and toy reviews.
“Creators are being held directly responsible by the FTC,“ Dan Eardley, who reviews collectible toys on his channel Pixel Dan, told The Verge on Wednesday. “So if the FTC decides that [we] are indeed targeting children, we’ll be fined. That is frightening.”
“It’s especially scary because the verbiage of ‘kid directed’ vs ‘kid attractive’ isn’t very clear,” he continued. “It’s hard to know if we’re in violation or not.”
