YouTube to roll out supervisory features for teen users

Rising concerns about harmful content have driven YouTube to roll out an expanded supervisory feature for parents to monitor their teen’s activities on the platform. The new family centre hub will let parents and teens link their accounts, providing parents with insights into their teen's activity on the channel, including uploads, subscriptions, and comments.

Kids need to be at least 13 years old to sign up for an account in the main YouTube app. Parents of younger kids can create profiles on YouTube Kids, but to use the regular YouTube app, you need to be at least a teenager.

Parents will be receiving an email notification for key events like video uploads and live streams, giving them better-supervising accessibility. The update will be focusing on teen teen users primarily, providing transparency for parents, to monitor their activity online, the update aims to keep teens at a distance from potentially radicalising and inappropriate content. The feature will roll out globally this week, offering parents additional resources.

In an official blog, the company said  “Our products for youth, YouTube Kids and supervised experiences for pre-teens, reach more than 100 million active logged-in and logged-out viewers every month and the development of these products is guided by independent experts in child development, digital learning, and children’s media who hail from academic, nonprofit, and clinical backgrounds. In partnership with these experts and in accordance with our youth principles, we’ve created this new experience that respects teens’ autonomy by giving parents and teens mutual control and new resources that empower teens to become informed and responsible digital citizens. We'll continue engaging with experts and parents as we expand and evolve this experience.”

The blog also quotes Ellen Selkie, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, University of Wisconsin-Madison who commented “It's so important for teens to have space to make their own choices, express themselves, and explore their identity and values. It's also important to have the wisdom of trusted adults in their lives if they need them. That's why when I talk with teens and their parents about online activities, I encourage the idea of 'trust but verify.' YouTube’s supervised experience for teens holds these developmental principles by having teens and their parents share decisions about supervision with continued open, two-way communication.”