For our younger users, we’ve built a dedicated kids destination, the YouTube Kids app. We’ve invested heavily over the years to make YouTube Kids a safer, family-friendly place for kids to explore their imagination and curiosity. We have a higher bar for which videos can be a part of the app and also empower parents to control what content their child can and cannot see.

But we also give parents options on the main YouTube experience, including the ability to create a supervised account for their tween or watch together with their kids. Today, we wanted to give you an overview of the approach we take in protecting kids and families on YouTube.

This work builds on the framework we use across YouTube to live up to our responsibility as an open platform while protecting the YouTube community. Our principles are organized around the four “Rs”: remove harmful content, raise authoritative voices, reduce borderline content, and reward trusted creators. We apply these pillars across a range of content, from elections to misinformation, and they also ground our efforts to protect kids and families. This work complements our existing safety and digital wellbeing options and privacy and data practices for children’s content. Here’s how:

Remove

We have clear policies that prohibit content that exploits or endangers minors on YouTube and have committed significant time and resources toward removing violative content as quickly as possible. We also regularly review these policies and engage with external experts to ensure they are current. For example, we’ve updated our policy to cover content meant to target young minors and families that contains sexual themes, violence, obscenity, or other mature themes. In Q2 of 2021 alone, we removed over 1.8 million videos for violations of our child safety policies.

YouTube Kids is a separate app that is a filtered version of YouTube, has specific content policies and a much smaller set of channels and videos available. Over the years, we’ve raised the bar for which channels and videos can be a part of YouTube Kids, drastically reducing the number of channels on the app. For example, we’ve recently updated our policies to remove overly commercial content from YouTube Kids, such as videos that only focus on product packaging or directly encourage children to spend money.

Raise & Reduce

Over the last few years, we’ve been working to implement products and policies that help us connect families with high-quality content on YouTube and YouTube Kids. In collaboration with child development specialists, we established a set of quality principles to help guide our kids and family creator ecosystem. Age-appropriate, enriching, and engaging content can come in different formats, genres and cover a range of topics. They include videos that inspire curiosity and imagination, celebrate diverse perspectives and encourage kids to uncover their own interests and passions.

These principles help determine inclusion in YouTube Kids and how recommendations work in the main YouTube experience. On YouTube Kids, we identify and include videos and channels that are age-appropriate and adhere to the quality principles.