YouTube: Parents can now give teens more access, while still excluding sensitive content

For quite a while now, we’ve had YouTube Kids—a feature where parents can let their kids have their own accounts to explore the platform while providing parental controls. But as kids grow up to tweens and teens, they’d need something in between a Kids account and a regular unfiltered account.

“We’ve heard from parents and older children that tweens and teens have different needs, which weren’t being fully met by our products. As children grow up, they have insatiable curiosity and need to gain independence and find new ways to learn, create, and belong,” said James Beser, Director of Product Management, Kids and Family for YouTube.

YouTube is launching a feature that gives parents three different content settings on YouTube—Explore, Explore More and Most of YouTube. The supervised experience is still in beta, but they’re asking families with kids under the age of consent to test it and provide feedback.

Here are the three different content settings that parents can choose from:

• Explore: For children ready to move on from YouTube Kids and explore content on YouTube, this setting will feature a broad range of videos generally suitable for viewers ages 9+, including vlogs, tutorials, gaming videos, music clips, news, educational content and more.
• Explore More: With content generally suitable for viewers ages 13+, this setting will include an even larger set of videos, and also live streams in the same categories as “Explore.”
• Most of YouTube: This setting will contain almost all videos on YouTube, except for age-restricted content, and it includes sensitive topics that may only be appropriate for older teens.

“This option was designed for parents who think their children are ready to explore the vast universe of YouTube videos,” continued Beser.

Supervised accounts are currently available on mobile and desktop versions of YouTube. They are available in quite a few countries worldwide—including Malaysia, but you can check here for the list of other countries.

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