YouTube Will Use AI To Automatically Age-Restrict Videos

YouTube has tools that allow creators to place age-restrictions on their videos, where only those above a certain age will be able to watch them. However, the onus was mostly on the creators to age-restrict their videos, save for every now and then when YouTube’s algorithm flags inappropriate content for its team to review.

However, moving forwards, YouTube plans to make these age-restrictions more ubiquitous and standardized, where they want to use the same machine learning algorithm they use to flag inappropriate videos and use them to apply age-restrictions on videos as well. Through this implementation, it would make it more difficult for children to skirt around loopholes, such as watching it when it’s embedded on another website.

According to YouTube, this implementation means that when an age-restricted video is embedded on another website and a user clicks on it, they’ll be taken to YouTube’s page and will be required to sign into their accounts to verify their age. YouTube notes, “This will help ensure that, no matter where a video is discovered, it will only be viewable by the appropriate audience.”

YouTube has come under fire in the past for some of the content it has allowed onto its platform. Previously, the company was slammed by critics when disturbing videos and conspiracy videos somehow made its way onto YouTube Kids, which was already supposed to be heavily filtered to prevent such things from happening.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: AI (Artificial Intelligence), YouTube