>The FTC has indeed explicitly said that the content creators, not YouTube, are responsible for flagging their videos as "for kids," and the content creators are personally liable to pay a $40,000 fine if the FTC thinks they made a mistake
Can you clarify on this? So, you're saying that the FTC will punish content creators who _don't_ flag content as "for children" if it winds up being "targeted-to-children" via some subjective notion regardless?
Those videos wouldn't show up on YT Kids, correct? So they're not going to show up for kids anyway...right? That sounds like the way things should work.
My take is that the FTC is operating from a perspective that if you create content that's designed for children, and you put it on normal Youtube without labeling it, you're sort of "tempting" children to come into an unsafe environment.
In the Ars video, the FTC chairman says the following (16:30):
> "On the Internet though, you don't know who your users are. So what the COPPA rule more specifically does, is, 'where the content is directed to children, we are presuming the users are 12 and under.' [...] If however you are a general-audience platform like Youtube, you don't know what the content necessarily on your platform is. [...] That's what we mean when we talk about strict-liability for content creators."
To me, I interpret this quote (as well as the rest of the video) to say that the FTC does not care whether or not the platform is directed towards children. Keep in mind that Youtube is already officially designated as not directed towards children under 12. If your child is using Youtube, you are violating their TOS. My personal interpretation of this video is that the FTC is saying, "we don't care if the platform is for children, if the content is for children, the rules apply -- no matter where you put it."
As to whether or not content creators should be liable for Youtube collecting data that the creators don't even have access to, that's another question. But the FTC doesn't seem interested in asking that question. It's pretty clear to me that the chairman views creators purely as a means to getting at Youtube, regardless of what the consequences are to the individual uploaders. Creators are the "fish in a barrel."
The FTC is specifically targeting videos on the main YouTube site, not YT Kids, (because they claim kids might be on the main site anyway, regardless of the ToS forbidding children) and their criteria for whether they consider it children's content is a set of fairly broad guidelines outlined in the article in the post above.
Can you clarify on this? So, you're saying that the FTC will punish content creators who _don't_ flag content as "for children" if it winds up being "targeted-to-children" via some subjective notion regardless?
Those videos wouldn't show up on YT Kids, correct? So they're not going to show up for kids anyway...right? That sounds like the way things should work.