It's about time I said something about the elephant in the room. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has determined that YouTube massively violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998 by flagrantly turning a blind eye to the huge number of young kids using the service with their parents' accounts or simply by lying about their age during signup. As a result of that finding, Google's been fined a petty (by their standards) sum of $170M, and more importantly, they're being forced to either clean up their act or face significantly greater consequences.
As has been the case over and over again when YouTube is caught being criminally irresponsible for profit, they're going to overreact and devastatingly punish a significant number of content creators who have done absolutely nothing wrong up to this point. This time rather than YouTube purging or restricting all of the fraudulent accounts clearly used by kids under 13, as their systems can easily detect (the root of the FTC findings), they're going to place sanctions on anything they deem to be "children's content." Mind you, there is nothing in COPPA even suggesting in passing that content for kids itself needs to be regulated, or that kids' viewing of that content warrants restriction. It only insists that identifiable personal data such as names, birthdates, email addresses, home/locations, etc. of kids under 13 must not be stored or tracked. In other words, there is nothing legally wrong with the existence of "children's content" on YouTube, and there is nothing legally wrong with actual children viewing said content on YouTube. The only thing that's wrong is for children to be logged in with an account that's not COPPA compliant when they use the site or app. YouTube's response, to butcher a metaphor, is akin to punishing the baby instead of throwing out the bathwater. It's egregiously idiotic.
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Original author: theJANG