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  • Parent approved content: Parents know better than anyone what they want their children to watch. For those parents who want even more control over the videos and channels in the YouTube Kids app, we’re rolling out a feature later this year that will allow parents to specifically handpick every video and channel available to their child in the app.
  • Improved search-off control for an even more contained experience: Parents have always been able to turn search off within the YouTube Kids app, but starting this week turning search off will limit the YouTube Kids experience to channels that have been verified by the YouTube Kids team. This means that search off will not include recommendations from the broader YouTube Kids corpus.

For parents who like the current version of YouTube Kids and want a wider selection of content, it’s still available. While no system is perfect, we continue to fine-tune, rigorously test and improve our filters for this more open version of our app. And, as always, we encourage parents to block and flag videos for review that they don't think should be in the YouTube Kids app. This makes YouTube Kids better for everyone.

It is our hope that these additional options will allow every family to have the experience they want in the YouTube Kids app.

James Beser, Product Director for YouTube Kids, recently watched "Photosynthesis for Kids" on the Kids Learning Tube channel with his 2nd grade daughter.
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The Value of People + Machines
Deploying machine learning actually means more people reviewing content, not fewer. Our systems rely on human review to assess whether content violates our policies. You can learn more about our flagging and human review process in this video:


Last year we committed to bringing the total number of people working to address violative content to 10,000 across Google by the end of 2018. At YouTube, we've staffed the majority of additional roles needed to reach our contribution to meeting that goal. We’ve also hired full-time specialists with expertise in violent extremism, counterterrorism, and human rights, and we’ve expanded regional expert teams.

We continue to invest in the network of over 150 academics, government partners, and NGOs who bring valuable expertise to our enforcement systems, like the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College London, Anti-Defamation League, and Family Online Safety Institute. This includes adding more child safety focused partners from around the globe, like Childline South Africa, ECPAT Indonesia, and South Korea’s Parents’ Union on Net.

We are committed to making sure that YouTube remains a vibrant community with strong systems to remove violative content and we look forward to providing you with more information on how those systems are performing and improving over time.

-- The YouTube Team

 1 This number does not include videos that were removed when an entire channel was removed. Most channel-level removals are due to spam violations and we believe that the percentage of violative content for spam is even higher.
2Not only do these 8 million videos represent a fraction of a percent of YouTube's overall views, but that fraction of a percent has been steadily decreasing over the last five quarters.
3This excludes videos that were automatically matched as known violent extremist content at point of upload - which would all have zero views.