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Parents Can Now Limit YouTube Kids To Human-Reviewed Channels and Recommendations (techcrunch.com) 41

Google is announcing an expanded series of parental controls for its YouTube Kids application. "The new features will allow parents to lock down the YouTube Kids app so it only displays those channels that have been reviewed by humans, not just algorithms," reports TechCrunch. "And this includes both the content displayed within the app itself, as well as the recommended videos. A later update will allow parents to configure which videos and channels, specifically, can be viewed." From the report: The controls will be opt-in -- meaning parents will have to explicitly turn on the various settings within each child's profile in YouTube Kids' settings. [...] First, videos are uploaded to YouTube's main site. They're then filtered using machine learning techniques through a series of algorithms that determine if they should be added to YouTube Kids' catalog. But algorithms are not people, and they make mistakes. To fill in the gaps in this imperfect system, YouTube Kids relied on parents to flag suspect videos for review. YouTube employs a dedicated team of reviewers for YouTube Kids, but it doesn't say how many people are tasked with this job. This system, parents have felt for some time, just wasn't good enough. Now, parents will be able to toggle on a new setting for "Approved content only," which also disables search. A later version of YouTube Kids will go even further -- allowing parents to select individual videos or channels they approve of, for a truly handpicked selection. The new features in YouTube Kids will roll out over the course of the year, the company says, with everything but the explicit whitelisting option arriving this week.
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Parents Can Now Limit YouTube Kids To Human-Reviewed Channels and Recommendations

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  • Great! (Score:3, Funny)

    by AbRASiON ( 589899 ) * on Thursday April 26, 2018 @08:59PM (#56510947) Journal

    So now that you've got an approved messaging "safe space" section, can we assume that Youtube will stop pulling down any channels / demonetizing ones which are seemingly "wrong-think"?
    Maybe you can leave those alone since the kids are safe now, right? Right?

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Unfortunately the take-downs and de-monetization are unlikely to stop.

      The illegitimate take-downs are mostly due to false flagging attacks. Dick Coughlan was hit for the 4th time yesterday. If there is any human oversight, it's not working.

      De-monetization is driven by the advertisers, not YouTube. You can't force advertisers to give you money. The most you can do is appeal to them to not remove their ads from your content, but they seem to have little interest in that because most of them are pandering to t

      • To be honest, anything that removes support from Paul Logan and all the other fucked-up attention seekers has to be a good thing. I don't care about blocking racists, terrorists, gay porn or monkey fucking cannibal misogynistic rape gangs - as long as we stop rewarding the fucked up attention seekers. It scares me more than anything that my kids will see any of these people as role models, or anything other than people to be pitied.

      • Demonitization is also driven in part by corporate 'news' organizations [cnn.com]. It wasn't enough for youtube to adjust their recommended algorithm to favor corporate mouthpieces for propaganda, they want to eliminate income for independent news commentators as well.

        And before you say "but infowars!", CNN is also targeting Jimmy Dore with this hatchet piece.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • My guess is if they are capable of doing this, they are too old for YouTube Kids anyway and you probably should worry about them creating a porn account.

  • As someone whos kids watch a lot of youtube kids this is a good start. Next, let us select the language of videos. My kid gets quite upset at foreign language programming and as a parent, I am unable to really tell if it's appropriate. Next, for god sakes let us set the video quality! Mobile data isn't free and most parents use hotspots not devices with sim cards, making the 'No HD on mobile data' option useless. Even when my kids had a tablet with a radio the No HD on mobile data still ran 480p that ate da

  • by Anonymous Coward

    So much for those algorithms, huh?

  • I figured that they did that already with a feature like that and that it wasn't just built on a subset of searches in their database.

  • What they didn't tell you about were the "humans" they hired to review videos: Pee Wee Herman, Bruce Paddock, Mark Salling, and a group of former Catholic priests from San Polo.

  • Well, there's humans, and there's humans. Are these correctly motivated, engaged humans, or very very cheap humans for whom there's little consequence for clicking "yeah, pass, whatever"?

  • So in other words what they are saying is animal porn videos won't popup in kid's searches, but videos by the LGBTQQIP2SAA community on how they identify as a sheep and really are a sheep on the inside and like to fuck other sheep because that is natural and beautiful, and hey while we are at it here is a some footage of a guy covered in glued on cotton balls buggering a sheep, but you know YouTube aren't fascist bigots so that's ok, will show up in their search results.

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