YouTube to ban any live streams of minors who are not accompanied by an adult

Recently, Facebook was under fire for letting the Christchurch massacre  be live-streamed for 17 minutes before taking it down. Post the horrifying event a lot of questions have been raised regarding the ability of tech giants such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and more to monitor live streams . Today, YouTube is streamlining its live streaming policy for minors.

As per a  blog post by YouTube , the company will be banning any live streams “of minors if they aren’t clearly accompanied by an adult". Machine learning will be used to monitor specific types of content which are in violation of this policy. YouTube has also expanded the list of limiting ‘borderline’ content in its recommendations by adding videos which feature minors in risky situations to that list.

“While the content itself does not violate our policies, we recognise that minors could be at risk of online or offline exploitation. We’ve already applied these changes to tens of millions of videos across YouTube,” said the company in its blog post.

Earlier in March, after being hounded by the media and parents for allowing harmful/disturbing/ predatory recommendations  and comments on YouTube Kids videos, the company disabled comments on certain videos. Apart from this, YouTube has also been working on a more effective classifier that will weed out the predatory comments on videos at 2X the earlier rate.