Drago's Blog

[-POST EN ESPAÑOL]

(Children’s Online Privacy Protection) was announced and is going to make drastic changes on Youtube’s platform next year.

Originally, it was planned that these guidelines would be applied on YouTube Kids to prevent children from sharing their information, however, it has ended up being imposed on the entire platform. YouTube users received a notification through an email where they should be responsible for the audience to which their videos are aimed for. Currently these guidelines the FTC has released so far are pretty vague, and there’s a lot of concern in a huge part of YouTube community, not only in the United States but globally, since the users would be getting a fine of approximately $40000 dollars for incorrectly setting the video to the wrong audience (by them or the Youtube automated systems), even if we are not living in the United States. Users that have created content aimed for children -anybody under 13-  will lose some functions in their videos/channels: -Notifications will be deactivated. -Comments will be deactivated. -Videos will no longer appear in the search engines. -Videos won’t be recommended -Ads will be reduced by 90% -Live functions like Super Chat will be deactivated.

Channels that set their content as NOT aimed for children under 13, will also be affected in terms of decreasing their income, and basically being censored since it’s supposed to be “mature” content.

Channels which content is aimed for teenagers or young adults -from 13 to 28 and more- will be affected unfairly, since this law considers “only for kids” videos that contain animations, cartoonish characters, colorful pictures/sequences or toys, as well as videos using slang words or pop culture terms like “fun” “free gifts” “duh” “whatever”, etc.

As for animation channels using the words  “animation” or “animated” in the titles, descriptions or tags will also be flagged as content made for kids even if the topics of the videos are aimed for teenagers or adults. The animators would be affected by losing the channel functions mentioned before, getting a huge decrease in their revenue and the risk of being fined for making inappropriate content disguised as “flashy videos for kids.”

The FTC is still open to comments until December 9th. If you want to help, here’s the link to send them a comment about this situation. PLEASE DON’T SEND HATE OR TREATS. We must let them know these changes are very aggressive with a huge part of Youtube Content Creators.

https://www.regulations.gov/comment?D=FTC-2019-0054-0001

There’s also a petition you can sign to save Youtube’s Family Friendly content, and prevent this affect other internet platforms in the future.

https://www.change.org/p/youtubers-and-viewers-unite-against-ftc-regulation

Also, this is a video talking about this topic that is being a trend on Youtube. We gotta spread this thing, guys. Many artists, gamers and family friend content creators, new ones and popular ones are all in danger. 

this is Gustavo Gatica, a 21 year old student that was blinded of BOTH eyes yesterday because the police shot him in the face.