YouTube has launched new safety features for children and teens. Now parents can control the viewing time of shorts. Teens will be shown better content and account management will be easier.
YouTube has announced major changes to make its platform safer for kids and teens and easier for parents. The biggest change in this is that now parents will be able to decide for how long their child can watch YouTube Shorts videos. These changes also include promoting better content for teenagers. Additionally, YouTube will soon introduce a new sign-up system to make account management easier for families. Let us know about these new changes in detail.
screen time control on youtube
Now parents will be able to decide for how long kids and teens watch YouTube Shorts videos. For this, time to scroll shorts can be set. If parents want, they can also set this timer completely to zero. This means that if the child is studying or needs to concentrate on homework, the shorts videos can be turned off completely. At the same time, if the family is going somewhere in the car, then the time for watching videos on YouTube can be fixed for 30 or 60 minutes. YouTube says that such a feature has been introduced for the first time. It gives parents complete control over their children’s shorts content. Additionally, parents can also set reminders for bedtime and breaks as per their needs.
Better content for teens
Another big change is related to promoting better and meaningful content for teenagers. The aim is to ensure that teens watch content that is not only entertaining but also age appropriate and knowledge enhancing. This guideline has been prepared in collaboration with professionals, university professors and psychological organizations. Under this, more crash courses and educational content will be shown to teenagers. Along with this, YouTube will also make changes in its recommendation system, so that positive and informative content is shown instead of low quality or distracting videos.
Account Management
Another important change is to make account management easier for families. For this, YouTube will soon bring a new sign-up system, through which parents will be able to easily create new accounts for their children. Additionally, the mobile app will allow you to switch between kid accounts, teen accounts and parent accounts with just a few taps. This will ensure that anyone watching YouTube at home gets age-appropriate content and settings. This feature will save parents from the trouble of changing settings again and again. Also, it will clearly show who is watching YouTube at any given time.
What does the company say
YouTube’s vice president of product management, Jennifer Flannery O’Connor, said that the company believes that instead of keeping children away from the digital world, it is more important to teach them how to stay safe. Jennifer O’Connor also clarified that these changes are related to screen time control, more informative content for teens and account management.