YouTube bans children from live-streaming without parental supervision in new policy update

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Along with platforms like Facebook and Instagram, Youtube has been facing a content moderation crisis for quite a while now. Worse yet has been the company’s flat-out refusal to take the steps necessary to combat this litany of issues – especially in regards to what is arguably its biggest issue, pedophilia.

Now, following a bombshell report by The New York Times on Monday (which was more or less just an up-jumped version of what we wrote, NBD), the streaming giant has finally taken a proactive step in the right direction, per Variety.

YouTube is taking additional steps to restrict the possibility that children will be targeted by predators on the video platform — including banning young kids from live-streaming with adult supervision.

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 policy updates come just a few months after YouTube announced its intention to disable comments on nearly all of its kids’ videos

A decision no doubt influenced when it was discovered that a loophole in the company’s algorithm was recommending suggestive videos of children to users searching sexual content.

In a blog post making the announcement, YouTube stated that “Responsibility is our number one priority, and chief among our areas of focus is protecting minors and families.”

“With this update, we’ll be able to better identify videos that may put minors at risk and apply our protections,” read the blog post, which also stated that the site has removed over 800,000 videos for said violations in the first quarter of 2019. Now if only they’d do something about the actual accounts responsible for the nefarious spreading of these videos (and far worse videos), then we’d be off to a good start.

What do you think? Is YouTube doing enough to stop terrible people from being terrible? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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Jared Jones

Writer. Editor. Barelyknewer. Hate mail can be directed to j j o n e s @ k a r s f o r k i d s d o t e a r t h l i n k