COPPA may be the end of YouTubers

Strict COPPA law stops YouTubers revenue

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The Federal Trader Commission has intensified their Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act made to protect kids online from being advertised too and having their data collected without their parents permission.

I completly agree with the protection of our youth but not when it’s done incorrectly or jeperdising specific indivduals for no reason.

The changes the FTC has done caused Google to be fined £170m for collecting children’s personal data, without them knowing since kids still access the Youtube app eventhough there is Youtube kids.

To be fair it is the parents responisbilty on what they want their kids to view and not view online. YouTube’s platform is just too big to stop children from slipping through the cracks and being advertised goods which they were not specificed for.

This new change means ads can no longer occur on the videos of content creators that cater for kids who are 13 or below, and are at risk of being fined up to £42,000.

Youtube has then since added a new feature where content creators would have to specify whether or not their video is ‘child friendly.’

If their content is flagged made for kids they will no longer have their videos recommended by other videos, the comments section on their videos will no longer exist and between 60-90% of their revenue will be removed.

In my opinon this is unjust because content creators who decided they want to market to kids are being punished and stripped of their revenue because YouTube, can not properly monitor their platform due to how big it’s grown.

It’s also funny how YouTube was screaming child friendly content to their content creators, and monitising videos which had swearing in order to support the demands for their sponsers, only to dramatically damage and strip the renvue of creators who are there to entertain kids and follow those rules.

Youtube has announced they will also be using machine learning bots, to help identify content made for kids. This is ridculous because we’ve seen the poor conduct of their algorithms and how videos which do not go against their guidlines are being striked or even demonitised.

Lets not even speak about YouTubes copywright system, which has YouTubers across the platform screaming their heads off. Something needs to change, and the new changes to support the COPPA law just ain’t it.

Unfortunately, content creators with animations, toys, arts and crafts or child like games (Minecraft) are also being flagged despite their videos not being catered or watched by young viewers.

Creators that I love such as theodd1sout, JaidenAnimations or even TonyvToons will be greatly targetted by these changes. It may force them into giving youtube a rest or changing their content from what we’re familar with because YouTubes bots will identify their videos as child friendly content despite being for adults.

A massive example of something like this already starting to occur is with the channel Pixel Dan. He had his channel flagged because he does unboxing videos of collectable action figures mainly targeted at adults. However, because it contains child like content (toys) YouTube had the audacity to flag his channel.

He had videos that contained characters from the adult cartoon South Park which was also flagged as made for kids. I don’t know about you but South Park is not for kids.

Other channel genres such as gamers like Jackcepticeye and Pewdiepie could risk being flagged as made for kids, because of the games they play. Despite the fact that Jack swears an awful lot in his videos and posts content which are not made for kids at all.

These massive changes will greatly affect our content creators and force them to change their usual ways of making videos. This may even result in many YouTubers stepping down from the pedistal that they built.

This new law isn’t bad and the outcome the FTC is trying to achieve I completely standby however, YouTube’s approach to the situation is unexceptable and they need to take into consideration the creators and viewers they have on their platform.