YouTube has great videos and music for families, but inappropriate content can be found. Users can report inappropriate videos, but comments and related content can still be problematic. Parents should set up a membership account and screen videos before showing them to children. The site should be closely monitored for inappropriate content.
YouTube, like many other user-generated sites, has lots of great videos and music to offer the whole family. A person can search for old cartoons or even short films from children’s programming and usually find a lot of great content. Inappropriate videos are typically reported within a day of posting, and people who violate the site’s adequacy clauses can lose their membership.
While it appears at first that the YouTube site may prove to be safe for a child to use, this is not entirely true unless a parent wants to expose a child to a great deal of obscenities, both in pictures and words. Sometimes, a video isn’t offensive, but the comments following it from users are, or a title itself uses profanity. Additionally, video searches can often lead to inappropriate content that hasn’t been deleted or reported yet. When someone uses a search for kids’ favorite things on the site, they’re also given a list of other possibly related topics. A child browsing YouTube is likely to find a lot of material that parents wouldn’t dream of allowing the child to see.
What a parent can do with user-generated sites like this is set up a membership account and run parent searches. Membership allows the person to create a bookmark page that does not have any unnecessary or unwanted content that presents itself to disturb or give children an unnecessarily advanced education. While searching, the kids should be out of the room, as things that look innocent can suddenly turn quite ugly, like drawings of cute animals starting to spew bad words.
By searching when a child is not present, a parent can screen for inappropriate content and figure out which videos are ideal for children and suitable for families. You can also set your account preferences not to receive inappropriate or reported content, although this is not a safety system. Unfortunately, inappropriate content can leak into the most innocent searches.
As with many Internet sites, the use of YouTube should be watched closely by parents and ideally navigated first by parents to help children avoid inappropriate material. Even for older children, the site can plunge into pornography, violence, and obscenity pretty quickly. Posting videos about children can also create problems as the comments can be quite lewd.
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