What was supposed to be a roundtable discussion functioned more like a public drubbing of YouTube. The video site, owned by Alphabet Inc.’s Google, is in the news every week for the inane, upsetting or harmful videos involving children.





A decade ago, fretful parents worried about video games and slasher films—but today, YouTube incites greater fear. “Now parents say, ‘Bring me the violent movie,’” Jill Murphy, editor-in-chief of Common Sense, said on stage. “It’s better than a Google search box.”





Alicia Blum-Ross, YouTube’s policy chief for kids and family, tried to convince the room that her company was getting quality content to kids. It has spent the past year throwing resources at child safety. YouTube has recruited staff and set up an outside advisory council. Last fall, the company hired Blum-Ross, an anthropologist, and speaking on the panel, she ticked off recent product upgrades – an option for screened kids’ videos only, more parental controls, smarter software. “We’ve actually made a lot of strides,” she said. In the first quarter of 2019, the company removed more than 800,000 videos for violations of its child safety policy.





Blum-Ross then touted YouTube’s supposed panacea: YouTube Kids. The app, created four years ago, filters videos from the main site specifically for children under thirteen, who are protected by federal law from forms of digital data collection. The app has faced criticism – that it’s too addictive, lowbrow and unedited -- but YouTube Kids is, relatively speaking, a haven from the dangers of the open web and YouTube.com. “We strongly encourage parents that the general site is not made for kids,” Blum-Ross said.





What Blum-Ross didn’t mention, however, is that not many kids use YouTube Kids, and those who do don’t stick around. Several of the most popular channels on the main site, which has more than 2 billion monthly users, specialize in programming designed for young kids, but that doesn’t mean they are free of advertising or screened for safety. One, Cocomelon, a channel of nursery rhymes, has more than 50 million subscribers. That’s double the weekly audience for all of YouTube Kids, which is used by more than 20 million people a week, according to a company spokesperson. (Much of the audience for a channel like Cocomelon could be parents trying to keep up with popular rhymes, a spokesperson said.)





YouTube Kids. The video site, owned by Alphabet Inc.’s Google, is in the news every week for the inane, upsetting or harmful videos involving children.







Children who do watch YouTube Kids tend to shift over to YouTube’s main site before they hit thirteen, according to multiple people at YouTube familiar with the internal data. One person who works on the app said the departures typically happen around age seven. In India, YouTube’s biggest market by volume, usage of the Kids app is negligible, according to this employee. These people asked not to be identified discussing private information.





Once kids leave, they don’t come back. “Many parents have expressed that their child refuses to go back to YouTube Kids,” said Jenny Radesky. Radesky is a University of Michigan assistant professor of pediatrics and an expert on childhood development, and was also on the panel held by Common Sense Media. “It’s too baby-ish, too restrictive. Now that they’ve let the genie out of the bottle with YouTube main, it’s hard to reverse course,” she said in an interview.





YouTube said it is working to bring its Kids app to as many families as possible, and has created restricted versions of the full video service so parents can screen clips for their kids when they watch together. At the Code Conference last week, Chief Executive Officer Susan Wojcicki addressed safety. “I’ve been really clear that that responsibility is my No. 1 priority,” she said. “There is a lot of work for us to do. I acknowledge that, but I also know that we have tremendous tools at our fingertips that we can continue to invest in to do a better job.”





In an interview with CNN, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai acknowledged the tension between free speech and hateful content on YouTube. “It is definitely one of the hardest things. In some ways, companies alone aren't fully equipped to handle problems like that, so I think there is a lot of work ahead,” he said.





Solving the kids problem is at the top of a growing list of headaches for the world’s largest video site. In just the past few weeks, the company has been accused of radicalizing young voters and ignoring harassment of gay people. YouTube has spent years chasing engagement on its service and ignored internal calls to address toxic videos, as Bloomberg previously reported, and it’s a habit that continues to irritate rank-and-file staff inside the tech giant. Four people at Google privately admitted that they don’t let their kids watch YouTube unsupervised and said the sentiment was widespread at the company. One of these people said frustration with YouTube has grown so much that some have suggested the division spin off altogether to preserve Google’s brand.





Yet YouTube is under limited pressure to change its ways. While YouTube is facing competition for younger viewers from Walt Disney Co. and Netflix Inc., it isn’t at risk of losing the audience. Some 97 percent of children have used YouTube, either the main site or the kids app, according Insight Strategy Group, a market research firm that polled 1,200 American families about online behavior this year. (The poll did not distinguish between the kids app and the main site; Chumsky said they stopped asking parents about YouTube Kids because many parents didn’t understand the difference.) Children from five to twelve reported spending more time on YouTube than anywhere else, including Fortnite and Instagram. “Basically, every kid who doesn’t live in Amish country,” said Sarah Chumsky, vice president for the research firm.





YouTube said it’s working on digital well-being: curbing kids’ screen time with features like a “take a break” icon that reminds viewers to stop watching. “We’re changing our metrics,” Blum-Ross told the crowd in Mountain View. But she admitted the company hasn’t figured out how to implement those without sacrificing too much of its business.





“How do we measure success when success is actually using our products less?” she asked.



