YouTube will no longer take your word for it when you enter your birthday. On Tuesday, the platform announced that it will be rolling out new age-estimation tools that will attempt to verify a person’s age based on a variety of indicators as part of an attempt to keep younger users from accessing more adult content and deliver “age-appropriate product experiences and protections.”
According to YouTube, the age inference system, which will be used on a “small set of users in the US” in the coming weeks before going wider later this year, uses machine learning to process different pieces of information about a user to determine their age. Those signals include the types of videos the user searches for, the categories of videos they watch, and how long their account has been active.
The goal of the system is to spot teenage users and direct them into a more age-appropriate experience. What does that mean, exactly? If a user is believed to be under 18, YouTube will disable personalized advertising, turn on digital wellbeing tools like reminders to take a break, and throw up some content guardrails to prevent the kid from “repetitive views” of certain types of content. Hopefully, that means it won’t drop these teens and their developing brains directly into the right-wing, incel pipeline.
People will have the opportunity to identify themselves as being over 18 and opt out of the more restricted experience, per the company—so if you’ve been watching a bunch of Minecraft videos but in a very mature, adult manner, you can specify that. You’ll just need to provide a credit card or a government ID to do it. If YouTube infers from your signals that you’re over 18, you’ll just get the standard YouTube experience.
YouTube’s age inference system comes as the internet appears to be entering its age-gating era. Earlier this month, the United Kingdom’s regulations requiring sites that contain adult content to verify the age of their users went into effect, adding a stricter age verification system that limits the ability to access everything from Pornhub to Reddit unless the user proves they are an adult. While the implementation has been less than stellar and folks are finding easy workarounds with VPNs, these types of laws are gaining steam.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled that a Texas law that requires porn sites to verify the age of their users was constitutional. Many states have passed similar laws, including some that have targeted social media sites to protect teens from the addictive and harmful aspects of such platforms—at the risk of also cutting off their ability to communicate and find community.
YouTube clearly sees the writing on the wall: age verification isn’t going anywhere. Papers, please.
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