YouTube to restrict disturbing videos featuring cartoon characters

YouTube has announced that it will be clamping down any inappropriate or disturbing childrens' videos on its service. The company will be restricting videos that show family-friendly characters such as Spider-Man and Elsa from 'Frozen' in violent and sexual scenarios.

The New York Times and a blog post on Medium drew attention to these disturbing videos that were aimed at young children. In August, YouTube said it will not be allowing creators to monetize videos that ‘made inappropriate use of family friendly characters’.

Now YouTube says that it will be developing a new process in the main YouTube app, that will age-restrict the inappropriate content. “We are in the process of implementing a new policy that age restricts this content in the YouTube main app when flagged,” Engadget quoted YouTube's Director of Policy, Juniper Downs.

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Once a video has been flagged from the YouTube kids app, it will be sent to the main app to the policy review team. If the team finds the video to be in direct violations to its age restrict policy, it will be blocked from showing up in the YouTube Kids app, The Verge reported.

The new policy will also be controlling who can see the videos on YouTube’s main service. Users will not be able to see flagged videos if they’re not logged in on accounts registered to users 18 years or older.

The company says that it takes several days for any content uploaded in the main app to go to YouTube Kids app and hope users will flag anything potentially disturbing to children in that time frame. According to YouTube, it has thousands of people working to review flagged content. It says that it will start training its review team on the new policy and it should be live within a few weeks.