YouTube Is Enhancing Parental Controls For Underage Accounts

YouTube is adding new layers to its parental control features, which include multiple surveillance enhancements and priority notifications on activities.

YouTube has become one of the most attractive online free platforms for content creators to build a profitable career while following their passion. This attractiveness has also inspired many underage creators to join the platform. YouTube has introduced new supervision and control features to ensure the safety of underage users on the platform.

The global release of the supervision feature on YouTube will allow parents and guardians to link their accounts with their underage children and share multiple account controls. The linked accounts will receive priority notifications on substantial activities like new video uploads or starting a Livestream.

YouTube has created a shared activity ecosystem within its YouTube Family Center, where parents can see insights like subscriptions, comments, and the number of uploads. The family center can also track accounts that are not underage, like family members. The choice to share activity logs can be switched on or off at both ends for adult users. For underage users, switching off parental control will require consent from the parent’s account.

YouTube now also allows multiple parent accounts to be linked with the same underage account, which gives both the mother and the father of a child to take care of their accounts. YouTube calls this the first iteration of a larger effort to bring safe practice policies for content creators. The current advancement builds on an existing supervision tool for preteen accounts, which they could turn on or off at both ends.

It is still unclear who YouTube will hold accountable for wrongdoings on its platform. If a teenage account executes malicious activity or uploads inappropriate content, and the parent somehow misses the notification, who will be responsible for taking it down? In an extreme scenario, will the child’s account get banned, or the parent’s will too? These questions will get cleared as YouTube either updates its usage policies, or comes up with a public explanation of how the accountability of these shared accounts works.