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You guys might have heard that since fall of last year certain youtubers have been having their subs deleted, with many suspecting that it might be a glitch. Recently there has come a new rumor, which came from a PAX after-party that this might actually be YouTube testing a program that age-rates channels and deletes underage subscribers from more "mature"-rated channels. And that when the program goes into full effect these channels will not even appear in search results for users with younger listed ages.
Keemstar's the one who broke the story after geting word from a fellow YouTuber from a PAX after-party

Yeah, i saw this before, if you watch youtube on a tv, there's an option to turn off/on parent mode thus it "delete" matured content. I once took 2 week to search RWBY, until I found that mode.

Maybe that mode is the huge conspiracy?

Because why leave entertainment moderation up to the parents?
Obviously it shouldn't be their responsibility to make sure what their kids are watching are appropriate for their age.

To play some Devil's Advocate here: We all know that the shitton of preteen kids viewing gore and playing horror games is evidence of how many parents let their kids browse unsupervised out of ignorance. It's saver to turn on the kiddie-mode by default and have it turn off by choice instead of the other way around which is clearly failing.

Basically an age-rating system which has existed endlessly before. This doesn't even sound like a big deal. The MPAA and ESRB work the exact same. M rated games you need ID and the R rating you need to have a parent with you and it's still given warnings constantly.

America has dealt with this for years and yet people are complaining? WHY? The only issue is faking age but that's on every website that has adult content like porn.

Also considering this is blowing up shouldn't we make an entry on this? (Trended on Twitter at a couple points and the views of the videos as well as numerous posts about it on Reddit)

The big issue that seems to pop up is, once again, YouTube's not telling anyone, they're just keeping it under the table. Right now it's still not confirmed, but with a lot of evidence going in its favor, it seems odd that YouTube would keep this under wraps after being given so much shit for their lack of communication with YouTubers

Wait, I thought Youtube already had a thing like this. Can't you just set filters on the results? I know one of my cousins does this for her children when they use Youtube.

They had Restricted Mode if that's what you're talking about. Also an 18+ rating if a video contained adult content but not enough to get it banned.

That would be nice and all except for the fact that it age gates shit at complete random, without telling the content creator why its age gated, or how to solve it in the future. AND its being done by a bot and not a human.

Heres a video I made that got age gated with no mature subjects in it other then maybe mild cartoon violence that wouldn't even get it a y7 on TV

And heres a video you can still watch at all ages that features an animal getting its face spit open and dying, is free for all the little kids to watch on my channel.

Age gates. That's actually admirable…if not for the fact that they didn't tell people about it first. (let alone let people decide if their content is appropriate for children)

Didn't Youtube Kids already exist?

How about make the whole internet 18 to 21+. I cant count how many sites got ruined because the underage users scared or pissed of the older ones.

Look at Reddit half of the cancer there is because of majority of active users are either 12 to 17. Who can't hold a civil intelligent discussion or just turn everything into unfunny memes/shitposting. Sure you can 21+ just as immature but can snap out of it far better.

How about make the whole internet 18 to 21+.

Bad idea. Just because you don't like the community on some websites doesn't mean the whole set of knowledge the internet contains should be blocked off from people who do not meet an arbitrary age limit.

Society needs to adapt to the internet. Better ways of age verification, or parents becoming more educated on proper usage and limitation, as well as the freedom that children should have on it.

What hasn't come up yet is how hard this has been hitting LGBT youtubers and videos on LGBT issues. It appears, outright, that if you have the word "gay" somewhere in your video metadata (title, tags, etc) it'll be autofiltered out. Because apparently that's not appropriate for children?

As an absolutely hilarious example, this one tumblr user decided to test it out. Here is a video titled "footage of my ceiling. that's it. nothing else.". Go ahead, watch it, turn on restricted mode, all is good with it – right what it says on the tin. Here is the exact same video (I watched both just to be sure) titled "footage of my ceiling. im also gay so lets see if youtube restricts this". This one, at the time of writing, does not show up in restricted mode.

YouTube is incompetent on so many levels. Not only do they notify somewhere around… nobody, for about… everything, they still mess it up horribly every single time. How do you accidentally make videos with "gay" and other related terms get automatically filtered out, if you don't intend it? You do have to program it with a list of key words to look for.

@Rivers I'm guessing the people who made this just assumed every use of the word "Gay" is used as an insult 13 year olds on COD use, not realizing that gay is something people actually are. That's only if it only filters out gay, does anyone know if it filters out homosexual, lesbian, LBGT, transgender, transsexual or any other terms? Because if they filter those out, hoo-boy.

I have school to do, so the best option is to watch entire videos to check this for you guys.

Well, this video did not show up when I searched "transgender" on YouTube with restricted mode on. It's by an official news company (ABC) and I wouldn't say any part of it is not safe for children. In a bit of irony, the video touches on how if there was better knowledge of trans people, the father would have realized earlier, while at the same time getting blocked from children. A lot of other videos are blocked when searching, but I am specifically looking for ones that are safe for children.

As for lesbian… based off of search results, I can kinda understand this one from a "okay what's the most efficient way to protect the children", because holy crap there's a lot of videos that show up that aren't safe for children.

Seriously, YouTube?

This video however is blocked even though there is nothing in it that I find questionable for children. It has 800k views and is a fairly emotional story about long distance relationships in general – while it has "lesbian" in the title, you could swap the gender of either person in the relationship and absolutely nothing would change, at all. The focus isn't on that at all – the story is all about long distance relationships.

This video is a completely, utterly SFW video made by the Human Rights Campaign called "Protect Trans Kids: A Message of Support". You cannot see it in restricted mode. How ironic that a video about protecting kids isn't supposed to be watched by kids.

This one is a slideshow, composed entirely of safe pictures, of one trans woman's transition. Unless the lyrics somehow contained something I didn't notice (all I could tell is "I want to partay") there is 0 reason this one should be blocked on restricted mode, but it is.

This might come across as conspiratorial to some, but he makes a valid point.

The age restrictions are hitting many of the alt-news/commentary channels very hard (think of people like Phil de Franco, Sargon of Akkad, the Young Turks) but the traditional news channels (CNN et al) who cover similar topics are completely unaffected.

While the argument can be made that some of these YouTubers do things the traditional media generally doesn't do, like swear, there does seem to be at the very least an uneven application of the standards used to apply the age restrictions.

YouTube: "You know what's a good idea? Putting important buttons at the bottom of a page when parts of our site grow when you scroll close to the bottom!"

The restriction criteria are so flawed that videos are removed almost randomly. Let's not jump to conclusions about what type of content this happens to. And let's especially not use search results as proof of anything, because they're even worse. For example, when I search for "spurious" and sort by view count, there's a video that only shows up when restricted mode is on.

Instead of my attempt to look at videos randomly, I'm going to just pick some channels as I feel like it, look at their latest 120 videos (unless they don't have that many), and see if we can find patterns.

CarlSagan42: Super Mario Maker gameplay. 157,264 subscribers. 45% restricted

CaptainDisillusion: atheism, viral video debunking. 319,423 subscribers. 63% restricted

Larry Bundy Jr: video game list videos, movie mistakes, board game gameplay. 252,437 subscribers. 65% restricted

RedLetterMedia: movie reviews. 535,301 subscribers. 91% restricted

PewDiePie: video game reactions, comedy. the most subscribers. 98% restricted

JonTronShow: video game and movie comedy. 3,128,866 subscribers. 86% restricted

Steve Shives: atheism, American progressive politics. 53,398 subscribers. 62% restricted (all 10 videos on atheism were restricted)

Thunderf00t: anti-feminism, pop science debunking, chemistry. 711,953 subscribers. 65% restricted (only science videos are left except 1 anti-Trump video)

ScykohPlays: Nintendo let's play. 153,555 subscribers. 2% restricted (this guy uses no vulgar language, but does make frequent sexual innuendoes)

Queer Kid Stuff: an entirely accurate channel name. 3,963 subscribers. 0% restricted (really)

Laci Green: feminism. 1,487,909 subscribers. 98% restricted

bane666au: men's rights. 19,740 subscribers. 93% restricted

BuzzFeedVideo: entertainment/variety. 11,998,489 subscribers. 67% restricted

PragerU: American conservative Christian politics. 748,845 subscribers. 10% restricted

The ShoeNice: eating gross things. 563,712 subscribers. 99% restricted (winner!)

Gorillaz: music. 1,375,934 subscribers. 40% restricted

Stefan Molyneux: fringe libertarian politics. 589,010 subscribers. 57% restricted

Gazi Kodzo: black supremacy. 46,562 subscribers. 58% restricted

I wanted to compare Gazi to a white supremacist channel, but I honestly can't find one. They seem to get swiftly banned if they put out more than a couple videos.

I don't know if we can conclude anything from this. The results are all over the place. The only pattern I noticed is that restricted mode really doesn't like list videos. It hides all of them from Cracked, Buzzfeed, Steve Shives, and Guru Larry. I suspect there's something here involving vulgar language, but I'm not going to go through all these videos and try to count that out.