YouTube adds more parental controls including blocking Shorts
While there is a great deal of useful – educational, even – content on YouTube, it remains a platform about which there are concerns, particularly when it comes to younger users. Doomscrolling is a problem, and it is to address this – and other issues – that YouTube is rolling out additional parental control options.
YouTube is describing the new controls as a way to “support teens and families” on the platform, and it is clearly a move designed to avoid the need for legislative intervention.
The Shorts feed can be a major time waster for any user of YouTube, so parents will be pleased that they are now able to implement limits on how long their offspring can spend watching such content – including blocking it all together.
In a blog post about the new parent controls, Jennifer Flannery O'Connor – Vice President of Product Management at YouTube – says:
Parents can now help teens be even more intentional about how they watch, with a control to set the amount of time spent scrolling Shorts. And soon, parents will see the option to set the timer to zero. This is an industry-first feature that puts parents firmly in control of the amount of short-form content their kids watch. This also gives parents flexibility. For example, they can set the Shorts feed limit to zero when they want their teen to use YouTube to focus on homework, and change it to 60 minutes during a long car trip to be entertained. Additionally, parents of supervised accounts will be able to set custom Bedtime and Take a Break reminders, building on the existing default-on wellbeing protections for teens.
These bolster the controls already available to parents, but it is hard to get away from the fact that it is easy to create additional accounts, or just view content without being logged into an account in the first place. This is something that YouTube is aware of, and it is using the launch of the new parental controls to share some news about upcoming changes. The company says:
Families already have the peace of mind that YouTube will place teens into protected under-18 accounts. And in the coming weeks, we're introducing an updated sign up experience that lets parents create a new kid account and easily switch between accounts in the mobile app depending on who’s watching with just a few taps. This makes it easier to ensure that everyone in the family is in the right viewing experience with the content settings and recommendations of age-appropriate content they actually want to watch.
The platform also says that it is taking steps to help educate creators better tailor content to younger audiences.
We’re introducing new principles and a creator guide to steer teens toward content that is fun, age-appropriate, higher-quality, and more enriching. Developed in partnership with our Youth Advisory Committee and the Center for Scholars & Storytellers at UCLA and supported by global experts from the American Psychological Association, Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital, and other global organizations, these principles outline the types of content that are deemed to be low quality and high quality for teen audiences.
We’ll use these principles and guide to educate our global creator community on their role in supporting teens on YouTube. The principles also inform our recommendation system, allowing us to raise high quality videos - like those from Khan Academy, CrashCourse and TED-Ed - and increase the frequency they are shown to teens.
If you are a parent or guardian, how do you feel about this new controls? Do you feel as though they will make any difference to viewing habits?
