Mental Health Cares, YouTube Launches Time Limit For Watching Shorts For Teens

JAKARTA - YouTube has reaffirmed its commitment to protecting and supporting the mental and physical welfare of all teenage users on its platform, by presenting new innovations.

In addition to automated 'Take a Break' and Bedtime' reminders that are already automatically active (by default) for users under 18 years old, YouTube officially launched a new feature that allows users to set a daily duration limit for scroll feed Shorts on mobile devices.

Users can set and adjust this daily limit through the 'Settings' menu. Once the deadline is reached, users will receive a notification signaling that the Shorts feed has been temporarily suspended for the day.

Not only that, by the end of this year, YouTube also plans to expand the parental control feature to integrate Shorts deadlines, so parents who use supervised accounts can proactively set limits that children's accounts cannot ignore.

YouTube also provides protection for teens and pre-teens through a YouTube recommendation system that helps them find videos of interest and pleasure to watch.

In addition, the video sharing platform also adds extra protection to video sequences for teens to limit content recommendations that are safe to watch once, but could be problematic if watched repeatedly.

"We are also reducing the frequency of the emergence of content like this for teens around the world to prevent excessive viewing habits," Graham said, Global Head of Health, YouTube on Thursday, November 20 at a YouTube Press Briefing.

At the start of the launch, this protection covered only three categories of content. However, after continued evaluation and consultation with Youth and Families Advisory Committee, YouTube expanded this protection to six categories of content, including content on physical comparisons, social aggression, as well as poor and unrealistic financial advice.