What Changes at YouTube Mean For Kids, Creators, and the Rest of Us

The biggest lesson of this settlement and its aftermath? The way we make and think about media for children needs to change.

In 2018, CCFC, the Center for Digital Democracy and a coalition of 23 advocacy groups filed a complaint urging the Federal Trade Commission to investigate YouTube and Google for massive, ongoing violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. We weren’t trying to catch anyone on a technicality – we were blowing the whistle on one of the most powerful companies in the world for knowingly and illegally profiting off of kids’ personal data.

Our complaint detailed how Google was, for years, intentionally violating COPPA by pretending obviously kid-directed channels like Little Baby Bum, ChuChuTV Nursery Rhymes, and Ryan Toys Review weren’t actually for kids. This was a huge money-maker for YouTube: at the same time Google falsely said in its TOS and to the FTC that YouTube wasn’t for kids, the company was charging premium prices for ads on child-directed content and bragging to advertisers that YouTube was the new Saturday morning cartoons. We asked the FTC to investigate YouTube and Google, not the channels of individual creators, because we believe that YouTube as a platform is ultimately responsible for making sure its data and ad policies follow the law. (And even when rumors of this settlement were first swirling, we urged the FTC not to shift the burden of compliance to creators.) We also focused only on channels that were obviously child-directed, because those are the channels where the audience is overwhelmingly the kids that COPPA was intended to protect.

Now that the FTC has investigated and found that Google and YouTube were violating the law, there are big changes underway on YouTube, including restrictions on data collection and advertising on child-directed content. Advocates, lawmakers, and child development experts recognize that this is a long overdue step to enforce COPPA — which has been the law for years — and end the insidious practice of collecting personal data from kids in order to target them with manipulative behavioral ads...

https://commercialfreechildhood.org/what-the-youtube-changes-mean-for-kids-creators-and-the-rest-of-us/