YouTube won’t allow younger minors to livestream without an adult

YouTube is changing its policies for livestreams as part of its efforts to protect minors from being exploited and preyed upon on the massive video site.

The video platform said it's restricting “younger minors” from livestreaming unless they're accompanied by an adult, according to a blog post Monday. YouTube considers this group to be children under the age of 13, who the site says need an adult to create their account. Channels violating the policy will lose access to livestreaming, and YouTube said it'll use machine learning to automatically remove this type of content.

These changes come on the same day as a New York Times report on a study from researchers at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, which found those who view videos of partially clothed children on YouTube would receive recommendations for other videos with similar content. The result, according to the study, was an algorithm providing those who sexualize children a constant stream of videos to watch.

YouTube came under fire in 2017 when inappropriate videos geared toward children gained large numbers of views resulting in the video platform removing millions of videos.

Early in 2019, YouTube also began disabling comments on videos featuring minors and removed more than 400 channels for violating policies. Some critics said these changes were not solving the problem.