YouTube Announces New Policies in Response to Advertisers’ Child Safety Concerns
By Chelsea Lish • March 6, 2019
YouTube took additional steps at the end of last week to address a controversy that erupted earlier this month over child safety issues, sending a letter to brands, media buyers and top content creators detailing new initiatives to help protect underage users and prevent ads from running adjacent to offensive or illegal content. The letter states that the effort to disable comments and commenters will continue and expand “over the next few months,” with the ultimate goal of prohibiting comments on all videos featuring “younger minors” as well as those that include older minors but have been labeled at-risk of attracting predatory behavior. These classifications will be made almost entirely by algorithms, though YouTube did hire 10,000 people last year to manually review content in the interest of more accurately flagging offensive or potentially problematic materials. A “very small number” of accounts handpicked by the company will continue to manage their own comment threads. Click the link to read the article.