this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2025
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Youtube doesn't have the best history for this. One channel makes stop motion animations and showcases Transformers. It got marked as a children's channel. The channel went on to showcase Transformers doing lewd acts.
Yeah, at one point Youtube in their wisdom decided that toys are for kids, so anything to do with them got forcefully marked as "for kids". I remember many LEGO and RC channels have issues with it. And having your video or channel marked as "for kids" disables 90% of Youtube features - comments, likes, notifications, saving videos to playlists or watch later, end cards etc.
Even then, Youtube basically has only two age ratings - either the content is suitable for everyone (but you do have to mark if it is specifically aimed at kids under 13), or it's age-restricted to adults only. Imagine if movies only had the options of "G" or "NC-17". But eh, in the end it is FTC and COPPA telling them what they have to do. The alternative is that you'd have to create an account and somehow age-verify that you are over the age of 13 before Youtube was allowed to show any videos.
It annoys the shit out of me that they never made the "kids" section of youtube an entirely separate thing.
Like TV, they could curate the hell out of it and not just allow anyone to upload, but no, they instead made way too much money from elsagate videos and videos of kids swimming. Now that that's gone, it's now making money off of kids from AI slop.
That's exactly what they did. Ten years ago.
It's just that the FTC and COPPA force them to also mark anything that gets uploaded to regular Youtube and is "targeting" kids as such, because they aren't allowed to collect data from anyone under the age of 13.