New YouTube rules could harm your kids

New YouTube rules could end up harming kids

By Julie A. Lind | November 22, 2019

If you have kids or grandkids who watch YouTube videos, you will want to be aware of some big changes beginning in January, 2020.

In September of 2019, the FTC fined YouTube $170 million for violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). For years, YouTube has violated the COPPA laws by tracking kids’ viewing habits and putting personalized ads on videos watched by kids under the age of 13.

In response to these fines, YouTube is requiring all content producers to declare whether or not their videos are made for kids. If content producers say they are child friendly, YouTube will take away comments, playlists, sharing, and bell notifications from those videos. It is predicted that content producers’ earnings will drop 80% or more as a result of not being able to run personalized ads.

Sadly, this means that kid-friendly channels could be a thing of the past. There are many content producers who rely on YouTube for their income. If they are no longer able to earn money, they will have no choice but to stop creating child-friendly videos.

If content producers say their videos are not kid-friendly, and YouTube or the FTC determines they are, they could be fined $42,530 per video. With most content producers having hundreds, possibly even thousands of videos, this could result in instant bankruptcy.

How will this affect your kids? Content producers are already talking about their plans to make their videos very adult-oriented. They plan on swearing and talking about adult themes in every video to assure they won’t get fined for being child-friendly.

This new ruling is not going to protect kids. Instead, it's going to expose kids to a whole new range of adult videos. YouTube will become very adult-themed, and yet, kids will still be watching.

Parents need to be aware that changes are coming, and it’s not looking good for the future of our kids.

Julie Lind is a YouTuber, piano teacher, composer and mother. Her YouTube channel, PianoSongDownload, has over 27 million views and 63,000 subscribers.