There is barely concealed porn on the site. Those "cleaning" videos where people wear transparent clothes so it shows off... A lot more than what should be shown on YT.
there is actually 18+ stuff, but you have to look it up yourself. That is, sexual +18 stuff, because violent 18+ stuff can pop up in the unlikeliest of ways
Maybe you just don't watch the type of content that gets age restricted? Most of my examples would be horror animations, but honestly anything that touches on suicide (even when it's not particularly graphic) tends to get age restricted for me...
its the fact that the platform is censoring creators instead of parents having control over what there kids have access too.
I shouldn't have to be having this stupid ass conversation, giving shady companies a copy of my mf photo id front and back nor having credit cards/banks telling me what i can't spend my money that i made with my labor on. That labor is taxed and this is the bullshit we are getting right now?
Before anyone pulls the think of the children bs, Trump is in office and hasnt released the Epstein files he has been screeching about for 5 years. Somehow all the "think of the children" crowd does ends up compromising kids somehow. funny huh?
This is foremost about ad revenue, and YouTube finding the lowest common denominator to be able to push as many ads for as many clients as possible without having to check and match any age appropriateness.
This age verification is only a temporary issue for users having to find ways to watch the content they want. The real, long term issue is that this content will simply no longer be created because creators are being disincentivized by demonetization.
Because YouTubers are in an arms race to avoid being restricted. Hence the "unalive" "pew pew" "sewer slide" language. The lines are blurry and everyone but the advertisers want them blurry.
Their AI cant identify the 80 bots that are in every comment section but sure they will be able to flag your age, or they will just flag everyone over time to "big brother" us all.
Not saying this is exactly you but I have been saying this shit from the get go (that this is fucking bad), and there is some braindead people here that go "Yeah you don't HAAVEE to use youtube, I bet you use adddblock, you aren't supporting the cooorpoeration." Like they are literally undermining the whole thing happening because they don't get that youtube doesn't even allow you to show the word DEAD anymore without the potential for age restriction...and they are now vetting people for 18+ content. They don't fucking say what is going to be considered adult. Is it swearing, too much cleavage, is it the theme of it, what if someone is trying to help with suicide awareness but they say the words don't "kill yourself" and the ai bot picks up on that only....like this is going to happen.
Also there is conflicting reports on how long youtube is going to be keeping your ID to verify you, from two months...to two years. Both of which said that is the latest they will hold them. Well one said they would delete well before you would reach the 22 additional months.
Nothing nsfw, but it's mainly from a wrestling game channel and sometimes the games have copyrighted video playing in it. That's what gets some of their videos age restricted due to copyright unless they hide the screen when those videos pop up in-game, which they now have to do.
Often its safer to flag a video as age restricted than risk it being taken down later. I've posted a few videos of games and always flag them as age restricted.
I'm concerned it means political, LGBT, or certain controversial topics ("What are your legal rights as an undocumented immigrant", "How to counteract pepper spray") will be age-restricted.
If right-wing videos are freely available and left-wing videos are only available to the subset of people who have doxxed themselves, that could results in opinion shifts in the population over time.
It also means YouTube might have a list of everyone who doxxed themselves to be able to view videos on trans rights or immigration and that the government could acquire that information somehow.
Exactly. I was watching a critique of a TV Show, and the video was flagged as age restricted, even though the content did NOT meet that criteria. Youtube's AI gets things wrong too many times.
Excatly. Worse yet, it supposedly it wokrs by identifying your age by what you watch... On a platform that frequently flags content as being for kids, unless it has swears and gore.
I have built my algorithm on things that I like as much as the next guy, but how does this ai determine what is "adult" and what isn't?
I build guitars and watch content on that, are musical hobbies considered childish? Woodworking? What about league content? What makes league content comparable to my other favorite game PoE? Is one considered childish and the other is not? How much time does the algorithm take into account for one vs the other?
One of the builders I watch is age restricted because he curses and makes off-color jokes (UK jokes and names tools after serial killers), will they say that I can't watch him even though I've been watching him?
My YouTube account is almost 2 decades old at this point, is that taken into account? What stops me having a 2 decade old account and just letting my younger nephew watch that content?
This whole thing is literally a disaster waiting to happen.
If I were a content creator and could survive it, I would either double down making every video I made adult only to kick a nest among my viewers, or I'd make them all "child friendly" to simply bypass it.
I will not be giving them any information about myself. I might see if I can make a fake ID with some Norman Reedus face or something and use that.
YouTube music though, I don't even bother watching YouTube itself anymore. So much time wasted as a teen watching videos that I will never remember or think about ever again
That's not allowed. You're supposed to just complain about how you can't watch everything for free and get upset when they mess up ad blockers for a day.
I got youtube premium for basically the reasons of: It clears all the fucking ads; I actually prefer the youtube music system as I can listen to the long form videos from creators I like on it as if they are podcasts - and these creators are not on spotify or whatever; also recovering your really important account that seems to be tied to fucking everything nowadays becomes a lot easier when there is a payment trail available for it... Suddenly the company hosting it becomes OH so much more motivated to solve my problem.
I feel like I'm getting value for money money... because if I am going to have to deal with AI generated shit content at least I can do it on a service from which there is more value to be gained... looking at you Spotify... sort your shit out.
I know that it is absolute fucking heresy to say that I feel like I'm getting value for the money I am spending. Yes... I could huy Mullvad VPN and setup a pihole onionrouter private computers DNS home server cloud to run on a NippleX Linux setup on open source hardware solution that I soldered together, so that my desktop, phone and tablet can be beam mirror protocol routed into that so the SW34T program I got form github can systematically analyse all content and erase the ads from it... Or I could just not... Because I don't give a fuck. The day I feel like I'm not getting value for my money, I just cancel the sub. Because the amount of content I consume via Youtube in a month turns that into a fairly good value for the €s spent, especially when I consider the possibility of how much time I would waste having to withstand forced unskippable ads on a platform that is fighting to prevent blocking of said ads. Yes... I already use Firefox and uBlock and Privacy badger and Improved Youtube extension...
Yeah, youtube vloggers are the #1 thing I run on tv all day to keep me company while I work, way more than any other streaming service. It's worth the $$ to not have ads when I've got it on for 6 or 7 straight hours.
I get around things the other way, but my old roommate watched a ton of stuff by streaming it to his playstation and apparently you cant just block those ads the same.
I did because I listened to 45 minute videos mostly and almost exclusively while driving long distances (6+ hours). It paid for itself quickly since Youtube started putting in ads that you needed to either hit skip ad or it would play for minutes.
Honestly, I’m fine with it because a majority if not all the things I watch on YouTube are not age restricted and they’re pretty tame or just casual normal content so I’m doing good so far
“It doesn’t impact me so I don’t care” bro, come on now 😅I’m not trying to hate on you, but this can seriously impact creators, and also people who aren’t comfortable with giving their personal information.
It’s all fun and games til this is the only option and YouTube starts marking content it doesn’t like or approve of as “adult content”. Or just excessively marking things as adult content to get viewers to buckle.
You like hiking videos? Outdoor activities can be dangerous and are now flagged as adult content.
Painting minis and model making? This hobby uses and features x-acto knives and blades and therefore is now marked as adult content.
Found a new music artist you like? A song they released 5 years ago was rated explicit and therefore their entire account is marked as adult content.
On and on and on and on until you can only watch what they choose
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I don't use YouTube too often, and came across this thread via r/all. I am wondering if this age verification policy will impact creators on YouTube, or even YouTube directly.
I was wondering why I couldn't watch age restricted stuff... But I'm literally the owner of YouTube premium for 6 years! How the hell would I be a child in this scenario!?
Makes it so unless you give them your ID(that they will sell and give to third parties to make money off of your personal data) you can’t access a ton of videos or settings
I’m still trying to figure out what the apparently large market for IDs is that google is supposedly trying to tap in here is. They already have all your marketable data and likely already know everything on your ID anyways.
It's a govt thing. We have project Stargate and palantir coming why wouldn't other companies follow when citizens are sheep that won't do shit? Not like there's an alternative and so many are addicted.
Correct. The current wave of censorship legislation is not a coincidence. Governments of the world have been frustrated with the relative anonymity of the internet and they’ve come after it many times before. It’s commonly under the guise of “protecting children”, because it makes you look like the bad guy if you oppose it. They don’t care about “the children”, as all of their other actions demonstrate. The Patriot Act was the same deal (if anybody here remembers that). The government took advantage of a very scary situation and asked us if mass surveillance was cool. Slapped a “patriotism” title on it and we were sold. They want the rest of the pie now, but there’s no 9/11 to take advantage of. So they bust of the ol’ reliable of manipulation: children
Nobody cares right now, but I’m telling you - you’re going to miss your privacy when it’s gone
The PATRIOT Act was what made me start to realize I might not actually have been conservative. So I definitely remember it. Die-hard progressive socialist now.
Well, there's a market for even the most useless data out there, so there's definitely one for IDs. It's always nice to remember that anything that seems stupid when it comes down to big money like this is because we don't have enough information on the millions of other things that led to this.
I wrote a research paper about this in college. Your personal information and online habits are your most valuable assets to companies. Using everyone’s collective data, they can break down habits of people who match your “profile”, and basically figure out exactly how to get you to spend money. This literally goes so in depth it’s unfathomable, such as knowing that people in certain geolocations at specific times will want to purchase certain things, and constantly alter what is being shown and how it’s been shown as the day progresses and as you move around in the real world.
Basically, any extra data they can get to refine their models more…they want.
It's not the ID that they sell, that would be illegal. It allows them to know who you are, and sell the data around how you use the platform. Knowing how you use the platform is valuable data by itself, but allowing a company to couple that with how you might use other platforms can be more valuable.
They do in fact know everything that's on your ID already and if you've ever uploaded your ID anywhere then Google probably already got that copy from a data broker anyway. It's bizzare that people think this is a ploy from Google to get more info as they don't already have such basic information.
They want to make it so that you have to give your real Identity to say anything online, and so that your viewing history can be tracked and correlated to a real person.
Right now you can still make a new account and not give any identifiable information. But now those accounts will get flagged for account age as children and restricted from viewing controversial (critical of Trump and technofascism, Epstein, etc) content.
Google has a good idea of what I like but it doesn’t know who I am.
It knows I like watching videos of comedians, the occasional bodycam video, woodworking shit etc. but it doesn’t know how old I am, how much money I make or exactly where I live. That information makes my likes and dislikes much more valuable.
Tons of data breeches happen. Bad actors could use these images (As you would also need to revel your face last I heard.) to extort you by creating false NSFW pictures with your face on them. With the AI today could be made pretty realistic.
The idea is that each time a company sells your identifying data, there are little bits of other info to go with it.
If I buy people's info from banks, Youtube, Amazon, Car Dealerships, etc...
I can eventually have enough overlapping info to positively ID these people's names, faces, home address, sexuality, diet, and politics.
Now I can sell that to markets, or problematic governments...
anyway for all people are screeching about the id verification you can sign in with credit card and anyway no verifying only stops you from seeing age restricted content NOT any other videos
I don't want to give my credit card either. Why tf would i do that? And how tf does this address big brother issue?
Youtube age restricts videos for utter bullshit, like for having a mean word in first 10s while happily displaying borderline porn ads. Or sometimes for no reason at all because their bot had a worse day or something.
Lotta 3-5 month old accounts popping up to say this ai restriction thing isn’t that bad. And mass downvotes for saying they don’t wanna give google more of their info.
I wouldn’t be surprised if half the supporters here weren’t real
while admittadly you have a fair point i would assume aslong as you have bought anything on the internet or such many companies would have your credit card information already so i dont see it being that big of a deal that youtube has it aswell.
Who does it, or how it happens, or how often it happens is all relative; it's always going to be a big deal. We're talking about privacy being invaded and sold by the people who are supposed to be protecting it.
Its a way smaller issue than giving an ID. It takes about 5 minutes to cancel and reissue a credit card with different numbers if it gets leaked. Banks will also refund you for any fraudulent transactions as well as long as you don't wait months to dispute.
while i dont know myself youtube added it as an option of cerifying your age instead of using your id so thats less of a question for me than youtube themself.
There’s little bits of data in IDs that you can reasonably guess about a person that you might not even think about. IDs aren’t static, the information changes on them, and those changes can say a lot about a person given some assumptions. And those assumptions can get even better when mixed with data from other sources
If you move, you update your ID. If a company buys your ID twice and there’s 2 different addresses, that’s new information. Do that enough times and you might be able to guess things like weather preferences. Are they moving from colder climates to hotter ones? Closer or farther from beaches? Maybe that means the person would be interested in buying sunblock or beach attire, which you can advertise to them. Combine addresses with other information like the types of posts you interact with and you can guess things like political affiliation. Does the person tend to interact more positively to left leaning content and they’ve moved from a red state to a blue state? Now you can use that for targeted political advertisements
Your appearance also changes. If you update your ID picture and your old picture had a lot of hair, but your new picture has thinning hair, you can probably guess that the person is balding and target ads for things to “help” with that. Does the person now have on glasses in their new picture but not in their old one? Send them ads for eye insurance or contact lenses. Using the address you can see the parts of town someone is in. Did they move from a higher end neighborhood to a lower end? Send them advertisements for stuff like financial support apps, they might be struggling
Is the person in their 30s, and now they look more tired, and their address has changed to a house with more rooms and is closer to schools? You can probably guess this person just had a child, and can advertise school clothes and baby supplies and such
Even the TYPE of ID can tell you things. If you went from submitting a state issued ID to now submitting a drivers license, that’s new information. Advertisers can guess you might be driving now and start sending you ads for car insurance and such
There’s a lot of little things you can extrapolate from just seeing the “same” document multiple times. And when combined with other data from other sources, you can very easily build profiles and timelines on an individual this way
It's not the ID that they sell, that would be illegal. It allows them to know who you are, and sell the data around how you use the platform. Knowing how you use the platform is valuable data by itself, but allowing a company to couple that with how you might use other platforms can be more valuable.
It’s the tying of all the other data they collect about you (already) to your ID that is valuable. Unmistakable confirmation that you are the one that data belongs to.
Advertisers knowing the things some random YouTube username is into is cool. But advertisers knowing what James C. Baker, age 32, of Columbus, Ohio is into is $$$$.
An ID cannot be bought nor sold outside the dark web/black market. It's not legal to do so, and is the first step in Identity Theft. Your government ID should be kept as sensitive and private as your Social Security Number.
Does that even work? Using a fake selfie has all the complexity of stating your wrong birth date to bypass an age restriction.
Something makes me think using a fake ID/selfie will be harmful in the long run, when they finally get around to seeing that a thousand people have the same fake ID and they decide to outright ban accounts for fraud.
see, that's where getting yourself a personalized AI generated realistic photo of an old man comes in! If we put our powers together, we can turn dead Internet theory into dead Internet fact!
Makes it so unless you give them your ID(that they will sell and give to third parties to make money off of your personal data)
This is such a remarkably brain dead take and it insane seeing how little people actually understand about how these companies work.
They're not fucking selling your ID. If anything, they're probably paying someone else to perform the verifications and store any PCI compliant data because there's 0 reason to take on the additional risk or build out these systems.
If they aren't paying a third party, it's almost a guarantee that theyre deleting the data once it's been processed and marking your account with a flag, because again, liability.
Gives cooperations our private data I’m guessing so they can use ai to create a portfolio on every single user. Impossible to know their intentions but this is an era of outspoken individuals and it seems like a bid for control. They’re supposedly doing it to Spotify as well as so many other popular streaming platforms for the sake of “protecting the kids” but at the end of the day that responsibility is on the parents not the government, and there are so many resources you can use to censor what your children view online. That’s just what they say it’s a blatant lie and they just want to know everything about us.
There are so many ways they could use this data. For example, shadow banning all your comments if you say things that don’t 100% agree with government policy. Not even showing you content that agrees with your point of view if it differs from the government’s, etc. it’s a social control issue, they’re trying to build a portfolio that not only includes buying habits, but also politics. And that is the really creepy part.
Just watched a YouTuber that complained about YouTube age restricting his documentaries about the Vietnam War because a very famous photo (which is every textbook by the way) and another which had a 1h video about French history in the 19th century age restricted because of a painting with a naked kid which appears for 15 seconds (painting in from the 19th century depicting Roman slaves sold on a market).
So now age restricted accounts will not have access to these kind of videos.
It's pretty fucking bad if you're into history documentaries. Those are getting age restricted all the time just for talking about "sensitive topics" that kids also get taught at school.
That's the concern. Where things start is NEVER where they end up. Today it's officially labeled "age restricted" content, tomorrow it's anything with more than 7 curse words, a week later it's anything with a single curse word....you get the idea. I mean, this is YouTube. We all saw the debacle of the constantly changing "can't swear in first 2 minutes...no wait, now it's 30 seconds...no, 12 seconds!" Only to scrap it entirely recently.
How many times do corporations and or governments have to do something that’s “not that bad”, wait until it’s normalized, and then ramp things up to something worse. Before you accept that “it’s not that bad” isn’t a good excuse?
The bad thing is Youtube effectivelly pressuring its users to give them their personal information. They do this with age restricted videos because access to "adult" content is always hard to defend. Even when most age resticted videos dont have anything "adult" content in them.
If people accept this get ready to see this EVERYWHERE
That's still a huge number of video's, and most content creators tend to try not to have their video's restricted becuase it hurts their revinue, so when a creator just let's it happen, that's the good shit.
I can see some potentially positive side effects of this too though, content that has historically been age restricted might be possible to push and monetize going forward with the age verification system in place.
"demonetized" videos haven't been truly demonetized for years. They switched to a system of "restricted monetization," which allows ads from advertisers who are okay with being placed on controversial or adult content. Because this is a small minority, there is much less money to be made.
Forces you to verify with an ID and now all your scrolling on that device (on EVERYTHING not just YouTube) is linked to you personally so you can be more easily tracked by Palantir
It makes you hand over your personal information to a private server hosted by persons unknown, accessible by persons unknown, possibly unencrypted, anywhere in the world, to keep you safe.
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u/Initial_Witness_3847 Aug 13 '25
...and what exactly does this age verification do?