Is YouTube Stopping Recommending Videos About Physical Appearance to Teens?

Yes, YouTube is stopping recommending videos about physical appearance to teens to cope with the problems of minors thinking bad about their body, weight, fitness, and overall physical appearance.

While their age is not enough to think about such issues, they shouldn't be exposed to videos sharing why their looks are not up to the trends and why they should lose weight, get fit, or do something to their physical appearance.

This has been a big concern for many households where YouTube is the main source of watching videos and every teenager is already able to watch whatever they want on YouTube. Taking notes on this, YouTube on Thursday announced the restriction policies for video recommendations to teenagers.

To add another safety level, YouTube introduced “Supervised Experience” that would help parents to link their accounts with their teenagers and vice versa and it will be released soon in a dedicated section on the YouTube app with the name “Family Centre”.

In a detailed blog post, YouTube shared types of videos that will be impacted by these new rules.

These videos are related to:

• Body weight comparison videos
• Fitness levels comparison videos
• Social aggression vidoes
• Makeup videos that force to change appearance (not confirmed)
• Any harsh videos about physical appearance (not confirmed)

This means that if you are a YouTuber and making videos about how one can change his/her lip size, face tone, show more or less body weight, etc, you will be going to get fewer views than you receive usually.

Here’s what they said officially:

“One insight is that teens are more likely than adults to form negative beliefs about themselves when seeing repeated messages about ideal standards in the content they consume online,”

With these new algorithmic rules, YouTube also improved Community Guidelines to enable the platform to remove aggressive content and not let teenagers see repeated videos about such categories.

And more on this, YouTube also crisis supports resource panels (currently in Europe) to help people watching videos that are too harmful and related to extreme acts about unthinkable and more.

Overall, in my research and opinion, YouTube is making serious updates to make sure people are safe and sound while they watch their favorite videos for free.

That’s a great approach though.