Last week Google announced they were implementing a “Safety Mode” for YouTube, with a password locking feature similar to the one Google announced for the Google search engine in November. The new announcement comes a little over a year after the Parents Television Council released a study of YouTube’s filtering , “PTC Analysis of YouTube Finds Explicit Content is One Click Away from Children
Popular Child-Friendly Terms Like “Hannah Montana” Give Kids Easy Access to Sexual Content and Explicit Language.”
When the PTC study was released, I tried out YouTube’s parental controls, and found them seriously lacking:
I ran a search in YouTube of a common term that might be used by both innocent minors and pornsurfers, “Teen Girls.” The first search I ran was without the YouTube filtering. The results instantly brought up a screen full of graphic pornography results, along with search suggestions for ”teen girls having sex,” “nude teen girls,” etc. I next ran the same search again, but the results weren’t impressive – I got almost the same number of explicit links.
I enabled Safety Mode and tried some other searches, and while results weren’t perfect, they are a big improvement. Safety Mode now blocks obvious porn terms such as “naked girls,” but still doesn’t handle innocent terms that tend to be present in porn links, such as “teen girls” or “lesbians” as well as it should. Here’s a screen shot of a search for “Lesbians.” The first link displayed with safety mode on is a porn link:
OK, so Google still has some work to do with their filtering, but what happens when you click on the link? You are blocked from viewing the video, and you can’t override it without a password. That’s great news for parents. Unfortunately, even YouTube’s blocked page still serves up more links to porn sites. That’s a flaw Google needs to correct:
Another problem is that the filtering of pornogpraphic search terms isn’t as robust as what you’d find in most filters. For example, YouTube blocks “slut girls ” but does not block “sluty girls,” serving up this result, that I was able to view in Safety Mode:
So the bottom line is that the parental control situation on YouTube is much better that it was, it needs more improvement before parents can feel comfortable letting kids roam YouTube unsupervised.
–David Burt
Full Disclosure: in my day job I work at Microsoft.
