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YouTube brings 'tweens-only' accounts with parental controls

WION Web Team
New Delhi, Delhi, IndiaUpdated: Feb 25, 2021, 09:26 AM IST
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Photograph:(Reuters)

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The service will have an 'explore' option for parental control settings that will have videos considered appropriate for children aged nine and older, for instance, tutorials, gaming videos, music clips, educational and news content

YouTube on Wednesday announced that it will allow tweens or young teens to open their accounts within guidelines set by their parents to restrict inappropriate content. 

"We’ve heard from parents and older children that tweens and teens have different needs, which weren’t being fully met by our products," YouTube's kids and family product management director James Beser was quoted as saying by news agency AFP. 

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"We are announcing a new choice for parents who have decided their tweens and teens are ready to explore YouTube with a supervised account."

Beser said that an early version of such accounts will be released in the coming months and will allow parents to use their google accounts to give their children access to YouTube with content and feature constraints. 

The service will have an "explore" option for parental control settings that will have videos considered appropriate for children aged nine and older, for instance, tutorials, gaming videos, music clips, educational and news content. 

A second setting will let children see videos that are suitable for people aged 13 and older and will include live streams. 

For the majority of the content on the platform, a "most of YouTube" setting will be there, which will block only age-restricted or sensitive topics that are only suitable for adults. 

The YouTube official said that the new service is "designed for parents" who want to give their children access to the platform, but with "limits". 

"We will use a mix of user input, machine learning and human review to determine which videos are included," Beser said.

"We know that our systems will make mistakes and will continue to evolve over time."