With the US Federal Trade Commission investigating, YouTube executives are considering turning children´s content into a separate application, while removing autoplay, in an attempt to protect young viewers.
The site, owned by Alfabit, is looking at far-reaching changes to its basic system after a series of accidents put it in a critical position.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Google executives are discussing the transfer of children´s content to a separate, stand-alone application, YouTube Kids, to better protect young people from unwanted videos, according to people who have seen On the talks.
The US newspaper described the changes as "the dangerous seismic shift, where children´s videos are one of the most popular videos on YouTube, and their ads generate millions of dollars."
Some YouTube staff are pushing another important amendment, which is to encourage the company to automatically turn off videos related to children´s content.
While this feature, known as the YouTube Recommendations, has helped increase user hours, it has also opened the door to criticizing the company. Instead of choosing harmful videos, children and parents are automatically redirected to videos that are sometimes inappropriate.
People familiar with the proposals said the motive was the ongoing investigation by the US Federal Trade Commission.
The investigation began last year when Google and YouTube´s "Alphabet" groups were accused of exploiting the popularity of the video recording site among children to illegally collect data under the age of 13 without the consent of their parents. The Wall Street Journal. "
The complainants also alleged that the site was displaying inappropriate content for children.
In contrast, the company said it had set up YouTube Kids in 2015, which does not collect data on minors to address such concerns.
In recent years YouTube has grown to become a media force, and the company says users watch 1 billion hours of content every day.
Potential changes, though still under discussion and not imminent, will be among the biggest ever changes on the site, the paper said.
"We´re looking at a lot of proposals to improve YouTube, and some are just ideas," the Wall Street Journal quoted a spokeswoman for YouTube as saying.
