YouTube finally has a Shorts kill switch, but there’s a catch

The appearance of sensitive content on YouTube is a serious concern — one that Reddit users are always airing on the r/YouTube subreddit.

Sponsored blocks with sensitive content, bot profile pictures that mimic sexual content, obscene videos targeting children, and more are all concerns that YouTube has failed to address over the years, and that’s precisely why parental controls are slowly becoming a critical necessity.

According to YouTube, when it spoke to parents and experts, it found three main areas of focus:

• Controls that help teach kids how to consume content responsibly, and options for parents to make the right choice for their family.
• Content that is age-appropriate and stricter policies and safeguards for younger audiences.
• The right experience for every age with a simpler account setup that includes built-in protections and makes it easier for parents to ensure their child is in the right YouTube experience.

With those focus areas in mind, YouTube is today rolling out new updates that will help parents tailor their family’s YouTube experience, with the headline feature being a Shorts feed limit.

The aim here is to help kids be intentional with their screen time. Parents can choose to lock the Shorts feed entirely, or give their kids up to 2 hours of daily Shorts-viewing time. The limiter also offers flexibility. Since it is easily adjustable, parents can quickly set the Shorts feed limit to zero when they want their teen to focus on homework, and “change it to 60 minutes during a long car trip to be entertained.”

A smoother hand-off for multi-user devices

Credit: Google

Elsewhere, YouTube is also cleaning up its UI for multi-user households with teens.

It’s introducing a new streamlined account switcher interface that not only makes it easier to jump between accounts on a single device, but also makes it much easier to create a new supervised account, as seen in the short GIF above.