On Friday of last week I wrote an article about the YouTube / COPPA situation and how I felt like people may have been making a bigger deal out of it than they should.
As it turns out, this is a case where I was very, very wrong.
Let me explain that traditionally people have made massive deals over nothing on YouTube. Historically everyone panics with every little change, thinking they are going to lose this magic service or get banned for literally nothing. Hell, even now I’m still fighting with people who insist their accounts are going to just be killed for being “not profitable” even though the text actually says nothing of the sort.
This situation, however, is different, and I took a passive stance with it until I noticed something I’d never seen before — that actual legal experts were concerned and urging people to be extremely cautious.
This got my attention quite quickly. This wasn’t the usual “influencer” who can barely seem read or write, let alone comprehend complex legal concepts, these were professionals.
That’s when I saw clips from a FTC briefing on this situation, and discussion surrounding this, and my jaw dropped.
Everything I thought wouldn’t be the case was, indeed, the case. The concern and damn near paranoia was valid. FTC officials were saying, with no uncertain terms, that they would be hunting for people who would be in violation of COPPA on YouTube.
This means yes, they would be hunting for videos that may be “intended for children” and aren’t marked as such. They would be policing this. People who are completely out of the loop with internet culture in all variants and won’t be able to tell anything from anything else.
Even worse, the restrictions YouTube is placing on content listed as “for kids” are insane — it basically won’t be shown, people will have to hunt for it directly from your channel, making it pretty much pointless to even create.
It’s hilariously sad how absolutely wrong I may well have been on all this – hilarious as this time I just waved it all aside and quickly learned I may very well be wrong on it all, but sad because of how absolutely insane all this actually is.
This is pretty much insanity. With people scared to create any content that will even remotely possibly be considered as “for kids” it limits what people can, or will, actually make without risk.
Hell, it pretty much limits the platform to blatant “adult” content which, ironically, is what they’ve been pushing away from for the past few years, actually preferring (supposedly) content made for “everyone.” Now that’s virtually suicide with the threat of a $42,000 fine, among other concerns just with the video itself being seen or being worth it at all to make.
There’s a ton more to be said about this, but I wanted to start off the week at least addressing this, as it truly may well be as big a deal as people are making it out to be. It’s an incredibly complex situation, and while given the history of panic on YouTube one can’t blame me for disregarding it at first, now I seriously wonder how it will play out.
DISCLAIMER: I’m not a lawyer, but apparently the guy in this video below is, so… check it out. This is the one that got me concerned.