YouTube Adds Family Center, Parent Insights on Teen Viewing

YouTube is adding a Family Center hub along with a feature that allows parents to link their accounts to those of their teen children for insight on child use patterns. Linked parents will receive alerts with aggregated information about things like the number of new uploads, subscriptions and comments, or when a teen starts a live stream. What they won’t get are details about the content itself. YouTube calls it “a collaborative approach to teen supervision on YouTube.” The move comes as federal and state legislators get more aggressive about regulating online safety for minors.

“Parents will be able to be alerted to new uploads across YouTube and YouTube Shorts, even if they’re private or unlisted videos, and they’ll be able to see when video privacy settings are changed,” TechCrunch reports, adding that “the act of linking the account won’t influence the YouTube algorithm in terms of what’s shown to the teen, however, as that’s already personalized to the user.”

In cases where a child misrepresents their age, parents won’t be able to alter it via account linking, “as YouTube defers to the age the teen entered when they signed up for YouTube,” TechCrunch notes.

The feature builds on YouTube’s existing parental safeguards for pre-teens. “Parents (and teens) will receive proactive email notifications at key events,” Director of Product Management for YouTube Youth James Beser wrote in a blog post that explains the company is providing parents with “an opportunity to offer advice on responsible creation” supported by authoritative resources, created in association with Common Sense Networks, an affiliate of Common Sense Media.

Simultaneously, the video streamer is adjusting its algorithms to reduce the number of videos promoted to teens that focus on weight and idealized body types as well as content featuring “non-violent aggression,” per The Verge.

That safeguard, being rolled out across Europe, has been developed with YouTube’s Youth and Families Advisory Committee.

“We identified categories of content that may be innocuous as a single video, but could be problematic for some teens if viewed repetitively,” according to a blog post by Besser and YouTube Health Director Dr. Garth Graham. Categories focused on “physical features” and “social aggression in the form of non-contact fights and intimidation” will be de-emphasized.

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