Is YouTube safe for children?

Short answer: not by itself. YouTube is not a children's site with some adult corners — it is a site for everybody that also has children's things on it. Whether it turns out safe depends on how a child arrives and what happens when a video ends.

What actually goes wrong

The problem is rarely the video you chose. It is the third one after it. The recommendations beside and after a clip are picked for what keeps people watching, which is not the same as what is suitable. A child who taps another thumbnail three times ends up somewhere nobody sent them.

There is also video made to look like children's programming and not be it — recognisable characters in scenes that do not belong to them. YouTube removes that when it is reported, and it keeps coming back, and a four-year-old cannot tell the difference.

What YouTube Kids does and does not fix

YouTube Kids is a genuine improvement: there is an age filter, search can be turned off, and you can build a list of nothing but videos you approved yourself. That last setting is the safest thing YouTube offers.

What it does not remove: the selection is automated underneath, so there is no person in the loop unless you tick every video yourself. And it is still an app choosing the next video by what performs.

What we do differently

No video goes on KidsTube until a person has approved it — that is the whole design, and it is also why we have a couple of thousand videos and not a couple of million. There are no comments underneath, and no recommendation sidebar offering something else. When a video ends, the next episode of the same show follows — not something an algorithm went and found.

In practice: a child who starts on Miffy ends on Miffy. That is the difference this site is built around.

What we do not solve

We are not parental-control software, and saying so beats letting you find out. With an account there is a daily limit and a bedtime that stop the player, and a PIN in front of the settings, My list and logging out — a hurdle for a child, not a lock. You can add children, but that only puts the section for their age first: Recently watched and the limit belong to the account, so two children on one tablet share a list and a limit. The post on playing on by itself covers what the limit does and what is still missing.

What is here is set out in full on How it works, including what an account keeps.