- YouTube has started trying to verify if its users are adults or not.
- When the system can’t make a prediction on its own, users have been asked to provide documentation proving their age.
- For those who haven’t, many have started seeing their YouTube accounts locked down to child settings.
YouTube offers probably the deepest video content well in the history of entertainment, and with such a massive library to draw from, not all of that content’s going to be appropriate for everyone. The site has long struggled to take appropriate measures to protect its young and vulnerable users, while still letting adults enjoy more mature material — within reason. Most recently, those efforts have taken the form of attempts to verify users’ ages, and right now it looks like enforcement is stepping up.
Google announced this past summer that it would start targeting US YouTube viewers with these age checks, using multiple data points to try to automatically characterize users based on things like viewing history. When that fails, or Google’s unable to make a guess with much confidence, YouTube offers these users the opportunity to manually establish their age by submitting something like an ID or credit card.