The Safety of Kids Or the Bankrupt of the Media?

By: Abby Valasquez

An act of 1998 being a federal law is taken more seriously than before. What is COPPA and how is this law going to affect us? This law was created with the purpose of protecting the privacy of the children, however, this is not only going to provide more safety around the world of the internet, it will bring chaos as the mature audience demands for more entertainment than children and this law promises to separate the barrier between kids and grown-up content.

The rule applies to any website or social media app intended for children under 13 years old to use. Nowadays, personal information such as your history browsing data is collected by these apps and your internet service provider. All of these things are sold and your information could be placed in the wrong hands.

In the video, “IMPORTANT!!! STUDIO KILLERS VISUAL ARTIST EXPLAINS: COPPA AND STUDIO KILLERS CHANNEL” the creator Cherry, or as she prefers to be called “Cherry’s Assistant” alerts her subscribers of COPPA regulations and the FTC possibly demonetizing them in 2020. They make music with colorful animations anyone could mistake for a kid’s video content.

A petition to sign and prevent Youtube creators from being badly affected is given in the description. Many people are complaining about the law from the U.S government in recent comments. Youtube being part of Google which is an international company and a trendsetter, has been included to take part on this act.

What makes this so confusing is that Youtube is categorized for teen audience. According to Wikipedia, a teenager is a person who “Falls within the ages of 13 to 19 years old.” If this law applies to the media directed for children under the age of 13, how is it possible that Youtube needs to pay for the consequences?

In 2017, YouTube made a huge mistake with including lewd commercials on kids videos. This happened two years after they announced their new media platform, YouTube kids. It was intended to create a safe place for kids that were unsupervised for hours in the original site of YouTube.

Here’s the catch, If YouTube has made a new platform dedicated for kids under the age of 13, then why would this law threat to take part of the original main site? It does not say anything about targeting advertisements to children on YouTube kids, but it mentions that YouTube (Probably the main site, because that’s where this act has been spread to be the future ruin of YouTube’s unfriendly kid content, and their creators) was collecting data from links that were placed on ads directed to the kids’ audience.

Another question that merged from my mind was; what if they remove all the kids videos from the main site and transfer them to YouTube kids and become a nonprofit platform that does not require advertisements to generate money? The original site of YouTube can still be accessible and have the irritable advertisements an adult can easily get rid of, by obtaining its premium version.

Everyone, even the mature audience complains about the ads but they have managed to survive with/without them. The problem seems to be centered around the advertisements of videos for children as COPPA is a law that promises to prevent unknown organizations or websites for kids to draw personal information from them.

It does not seem to be a law that prohibits creators to make videos such as the parody from the official song of Lazy Town called “You are a pirate.” A type of meme version of the kids’ song from this show, including censored lewd scenes.

However, many people believe this law is affecting YouTube, when in reality it can’t be mistaken that they’re doing something good with it. It might not be clear enough, but all that YouTube users can expect is the wait of the new update taking place on December 10th or in January 2020.

What YouTube has planned is to label any video that looks appealing to kids, but it’s definitely not meant for kids, for the mature audience where data collection won’t be removed. Only kids’ content will block data collection from advertisements.

The only problem they [ creators ] have is that for videos containing animated cartoons, toy reviews or gaming themes, the misclassification [ mistaking an adult’s video for a kid’s video ] for displaying children content in their videos could get them fined for targeting the young audience unintentionally.

All YouTube users, from viewers to creators think COPPA would ruin YouTube. But all we can do is wait and sign the petition on the website called “Change” where people from all over the world are starting campaigns. Decision makers, organizations, petition starters or journalists use this place for different purposes. In this case, viewers use it to prevent the creators from being demonetized and save family friendly content on YouTube.