Investing to protect teen wellbeing on YouTube

Teens come to YouTube to learn, explore their passions, and express themselves. We recognize our responsibility to ensure their time on the platform is well spent. That’s why our teen-focused products and features are guided by our Youth and Family Advisory Committee, a panel of specialist experts in child development, digital media, mental health, and online learning.

Today, we're sharing updated features, directly informed by their expertise:

• Additional safeguards on video sequencing for teens: Last year, we rolled out updates based on insights on the developmental stages of teens and how content consumed online can impact their wellbeing. Working with our Youth and Families Advisory Committee, we developed the safeguards by identifying categories of video that are innocuous in a single view, but could be problematic for some teens if viewed in repetition. We then developed ways to disperse viewership of those videos for teens globally to prevent repetitive viewing. These safeguards were initially applied to content that featured social aggression in the form of non-contact fights and intimidation, and to content comparing idealized physical features or body types.

We’re now expanding to encompass a wider set of topics that could be problematic when viewed repeatedly by some teens, including:

• Unrealistic or bad financial advice that takes advantage of teens that may have low financial literacy. This includes content featuring, for example, ‘get rich quick’ schemes, or suggesting viewers should buy a particular product that teaches you to get rich or buy lottery tickets to get rich.
• Content that portrays delinquency or negative behaviors, such as cheating on a test, lying for personal benefit or participating in public pranks and stunts that negatively impact others e.g. offending customers in a store while pretending to work there.
• Content that portrays teens as cruel and malicious or encourages them to ridicule others, such as targeting people in public who say they want to be left alone, or making fun of others for being poor.

As always, we’re continuing to enforce our Community Guidelines to remove content and prevent minors from seeing videos that cross the line of our policies, including on scams, child safety, harassment, and dangerous pranks.

• Making Bedtime Reminders and Take a Break Reminders more prominent: To better help teens manage their screen time, both sets of reminders now appear as a full-screen takeover across Shorts and long-form videos, and they’re on by default for users under 18.
  • Take a Break reminders can be set at certain frequencies as a reminder to pause from watching videos, with a default trigger setting for teen accounts for every 60 minutes.
  • Bedtime reminders trigger at specific times to encourage viewers to stop watching videos and go to bed. Our latest updates:
    • A new pre-bedtime reminder lets the teen viewer know their bedtime is approaching in 30 minutes.
    • The default bedtime reminder for teens is now 10pm-6am. If a teen viewer modifies their starting bedtime, the suggested end time will be 8 hours later.
• Dedicated YouTube Supervised Experience for teens: More families are using the voluntary supervised experience we launched last year. It gives parents and teens the option to link accounts in our YouTube Family Center, where parents can see shared insights into their teens’ channel activity, including the number of uploads, comments, subscriptions, and more. Linked accounts can also receive email notifications about channel activity and access to resources created with external experts to support conversations between parents and teens about responsible content creation. This is an expansion of our existing supervised experience for pre-teens.

All of these build on a range of features in place to protect our younger users and provide controls for parents, from the launch of YouTube Kids a decade ago, to dedicated safety and wellbeing protections. Our Youth Principles, which prioritize safety, wellbeing, privacy, and mental health, underpin all of this critical work.

Many of us at YouTube are parents, and we understand the choices families face when it comes to ensuring the wellbeing of loved ones and setting digital ground rules. Our goal is to empower parents with tools to customize their children's YouTube experience, fostering confident and safe exploration of interests. We'll keep investing and expanding on this vital work.