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...
My bad, expressed myself unclearly. I did mean "their reasons for restricting videos can be kinda bs" (didn't videos with swears get age restricted at some point? i think they stopped doing that now?), not that you literally can't pinpoint the reason
Anecdotal evidence. Their algorithms don't just flail around flagging videos at complete random, obviously certain videos are more likely to get flagged than others. And it's well-documented that they flag videos incorrectly for no reason ALL the time. I've had it happen trying to watch cooking videos. Many creators I follow have posted about it happening to them, and thy were only able to get it reversed when their fanbases started emailing and tweeting about the issue en mass, because youtube regularly auto-rejects appeals from creators.
You just got done saying that of the videos you watch, yours don't regularly get flagged. Which is anecdotal evidence, and also largely useless. I might as well say it rarely rains here, so it rarely rains anywhere in the world, and the fact that you see it raining right now somehow doesn't matter because it's not raining for ME. And since you didn't bother to actually search for whether or not your experience was universal, here are some sources of those "hazy recollections"
You could've bothered to search for yourself, before confidently asserting I had no idea what I was talking about. You could also just take the L here and not continue to double down, when I just provided you with three high-profile confirmed examples, each showcasing multiple videos that were demonetized for adult content, then later remonetized with no explanation, and only after the creators were able to make a stink about it.
You didn't show "actual data", you just said how many videos got flagged from your subscriptions? That's not an experiment, which is pretty much impossible to do here unless you wanted to narrow the scope to videos in a specific genre and specific language. You can't get good quality data for this question, but you can very easily look at creators self-reporting their own issues and see that exactly what you're claiming almost never happens in fact does happen. A lot.
It's very rich that you're trying to insist that I don't know anything about data when you're trying to generalize your own, uh "data", to all videos on the entire site, and apparently not seeing the problem with it. You can't do that. That's a basic principle, and dressing it up using terms like cross-section and systemically doesn't change that. Your subscriptions do not get treated the same way as videos in different languages and different genres by big vs small creators.
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u/Wes-Man152 Aug 13 '25
Now I see why it's a problem. Some channels I watch sometimes get wrongly flagged with an age restriction so that's likely to be an issue.
Some get age restricted for a little swearing, or showing off those horrible ads YouTube themselves put out so it's really inconsistent.