YouTube Cracks Down on Sexual Content

YouTube will attempt to keep kids' eyes off inappropriate videos by introducing a new category for and opening it to adults only.

The wild wild west of media outlets will be getting a little tamer in the months to come. Having already stricken copyrighted content and pornography from its libraries, YouTube will be further cracking down on suggestive content in the future to clean up the site for viewers of all ages. On Tuesday, the company posted a message on its blog explaining the new changes that would occur.

While the site will retain its community guidelines which bar sexually explicit, graphic violence, and other types of illicit content, YouTube will introduce a new category for inappropriate, but not necessarily banned, content. For instance, the new class will include videos that are sexually suggestive, contain partial nudity or non-sexual nudity, fictional violence, and disturbing imagery.

The point of the new system will be to keep these videos roped off from younger viewers, by requiring a login with an account owned by someone 18 or older to view (though age will still only be based on what users enter into a box when they register). YouTube will also demote these videos from highlighted sections like its Most Viewed and Top Favorited lists.

Other, less drastic changes will include an improved thumbnailing system that algorithmically selects which screenshots are chosen to represent a video, and stricter enforcement of the rules that ban misleading tags and descriptions.