Why the government should not impose rules like COPPA on YouTube

YouTube, a video-sharing website created by two former pay pal employees in 2006 is currently at its pinnacle, with 5 billion videos being watched every day and 300 hours of video being uploaded every minute. YouTube has become a place where people can get famous with fewer resources than ever before, for example, 30-year-old Felix Kjellberg also known as Pew Die Pie has attained over 100 million fans by posting videos of him playing video games from his bedroom. Pew Die Pie is self-made, gaining fame without any of the expensive resources you needed back in the day. Pew Die Pie is simply one of the many YouTubers who are taking over content consumption, but the US government has recently passed a law known as COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act), not allowing personalized ads on kids content, as well as requiring creators to choose if a video is kids friendly or not, with kids being anybody under the age of 13. If you are caught violating this rule when you claim that supposed kids content that you've made is not for kids or vice versa, you are fined a large sum of $42,000. Many of you may think a rule like this is simply a way to protect kids online, but there are many better ways to protect kids online. To start, the definition of what content is ok for kids is something that differs from parent to parent, making the idea of being fined for considering your content as not kid-friendly, when it's kid-friendly does not make sense. Many gamers play kids video games like Minecraft, even though their commentary is not kid-friendly, as they appeal to teenagers who play the same video game. Continuing with the teenager demographics, many of the most popular YouTubers typically have demographics of kids in middle school and high school, with many 12-year-olds, who will miss out on their favorite YouTubers. You could solve the problem by having a rating system like the ESRB ratings for video games, where there is the E 10+ rating, that has mild violence compared to E rated games having no violence and T-Rated games having more realistic violence. Some of you may agree with the FCC on their penalty, given videos that are not made for kids do make more ad revenue with personalized ads, but at the same time, $48,000 is a lot of money, especially for small creators who barely make any money, with 81% of parents not caring whether their kids watching personalized ads, making it something that is not a big deal. At the same time, personalized ads function as a monetary incentive for creators to make more money which they invest in their content. leading money-driven content creators to stop making kid-friendly content, resulting in a lack of content for kids, as a mom of 5 kids says "This is being done in the name of protecting children's privacy from personalized ads. I'm a mom of five kids, I care about kids' online safety, privacy, and protection, but this regulation is doing more harm than good,". For the parents who don't want their kids watching inappropriate content or getting personalized ads when youtube has an app known as youtube kids filtering and not allowing kids to see all YouTube content that is not kid-appropriate. The app even has parent controls, so parents know what content their kids are watching and can also be able to lock or unlock certain content. With this existing, you can also get rid of personalized ads specifically on this app, and keep personalized ads on normal YouTube. This will result in kid's content having personalized ads on regular YouTube, making family-friendly creators a little bit more money. Overall, COPPA is a regulation set by the FCC which is way too vague, making it something hard to comply with, as well as making negligible changes to kids online safety, given 81% of parents don't care about their kids having personalized ads and a mom of 5 kids believes it hurts Youtube more than help. Rating content for kids and not for kids is way too vague, especially for adult gamers that make content based on kids' games that are intended for teenagers. As a content creator, myself, the $42,000 fine for an unintentional violation is something that I consider too much and also threatening to my freedom of speech when I create content.


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