Over the past few weeks one of my favorite Social media sites has been rolling out a new feature and it has content creators up in arms. The site is YouTube and the new feature is called restricted mode. Now the problem isn't the mode per say it is the videos that it is blocking. If you are on a PC go to YouTube scroll to the bottom and click on restricted mode, this also works in mobile by going to the settings and selecting restricted mode. Then go type any gaming YouTuber, or any YouTuber that is part of the LGBTQCommunity or most any youtuber really. Most if not all of their videos have “controversial” topics according to restricted mode. The problem with restricting all of these videos is that some of them are not actually controversial, or are not inappropriate. Which it is a great idea to have something like this, but that fact that videos are not reviewed before being eligible for being considered inappropriate for younger audiences is the true issues here. People can be trying food. Like Taco Bell or Burger King and people flag it as inappropriate.

I want to know why? I feel like with this ability it makes the people that we call internet trolls have more power. The biggest YouTuber, PewDiePie, has come out and said that people will repeatedly flag his videos as inappropriate. If you do this enough times it will make you get a community guidelines strike and your video will be taken down. YouTube will also demonetize your videos, but that is a topic for another day. So why is it so easy to flag a video as inappropriate? I have seen worse videos on TV and I have seen movies that have worse content then some of these YouTubers.

Let's take my YouTube channel for another example. I do Let's Plays and some makeup stuff on my channel. If you turn on the restricted mode and go to my channel almost all of my Let's Plays are gone. Now I do not think that my Let's Plays are inappropriate, yes there are games that may be, but my content is not, but these videos do not show up in restricted mode. So I worked hard on making these videos, and editing them, but now people may not be able to see them. This can be a problem for a lot of people as this is their only source of income and where I agree that some content should not be shown, we are penalizing those who aren't doing wrong. I also noticed this if you type in other gamers like Markiplier, who have this as their main content on their channel.
This is a bad thing for the future of YouTube. They already have a kids app, a music app, and a gaming section of YouTube. Restricted mode should be available but it needs to be revamped. Now they did put a disclaimer that says that they can not get every inappropriate video into the filter and they even get some good ones. This is true, but also because of something called tags, or keywords.

You can go on YouTube and search for kids TV shows like Peppa Pig, and you think that you will be getting the cartoon, but it is actually a dark and inaccurate portrayal of the tv show. You will not know until you click on the video and watch them, but go into the restricted mode and you will find these videos still exist. They are not restricted.

Now the biggest thing is the LGBTQ Community of YouTube. People like, Shane Dawson, Tyler Oakley, Joey Graceffa, and more have spoken out about this type of censorship in their community and how it can affect just one life and how their videos have helped people. They are proud of the work that they have done and why should YouTube take that away? It has always been a platform where we can go to find out about anything and why should this be any different? They were the first people to speak out about this. Most of their videos get flagged. Their coming out video, their vlogs, even their DIYs got blocked. This seems like it could become a problem because it could be taken a form of discrimination. This is also something that the YouTubers have mentioned in Tweets. So why are we allowing these videos to be restricted? These videos should not be restricted if they do not have inappropriate content in them. This is something that can also be discouraging for anyone that may want to start a YouTube channel of their own.

So my question is why is it that we are allowing the inappropriate videos to get through the filter but the ones that should be getting through are blocked? I think this is a question that all of the content creators on YouTube will be asking themselves. Over the past year it seems that YouTube is making it more difficult for YouTube to be the go to video streaming platform, and now this is just another speed bump. It always seems to level out, but will this? Is restricted mode something that we really need if we have the YouTube kids app? I guess we will have to see what the solution is to this issue and how long it may take to pan out. YouTube has also apologized and said they are working on fixes to the issues, but again, do we really need this feature?