YouTube to restrict teenagers' exposure to videos about weight and fitness

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. You know what's far more common than eating disorders and body dysmorphia? Overweight and obesity which afflict about 75% of America(not hyperbole, look at the stats). Kids shouldn't believe it's possible to have a body like Arnold naturally, but if we're going to err I'd think it should be heavily in the direction of promoting fitness a little too much. I know first hand both the physical and mental health effects of being overweight and unfit. What the average American looks like is not healthy and should not be normalized, and I bitterly resent the healthy at any size propaganda I bought into for a short while.

This is disturbing. Most of social media is promoting unrealistic aesthetic standards, fitness might be the one aesthetic standard you can actually control with hard work, but yes lets ban that one.

* not restricting plastic surgery content * not restricting skincare content * not restricting fashion content

I‘m so grateful I got into bodybuilding at 16 thanks to the internet. I was a chubby kid with no self confidence and now 20 years later am still quite athletic and eating healthy. No I never ended up looking like Zyzz, but for all its shortcomings if it hadn‘t been for the online fitness community I‘d be much worse off today, be it mentally, socially or physically.

Some context, it’s (likely) the continuation of a long “thinspo” war started with tumblr and google image search. They now figured out how to do that for videos.

The topic is actually complex. On one hand, it is/was a beauty standard which drifts with time and visits corners. On the other, for a huge part of population anatomy and genetics simply don’t allow to be “beautiful”. Internet raised that up to 11, so people invented this “everyone is beautiful” idea, which is controversial. As a result, some people started praising “the body”, which sometimes get obviously unhealthy and, tbh, repulsive.

Personally I see it as a typical western craze. You had one problem, now you have two and there’s no middle cause it means undo both and do nothing and you’re unable of neither.

Added:

The platform will still allow 13- to 17-year-olds to view the videos, but its algorithms will not push young users down related content “rabbit holes” afterwards

Actually sounds reasonable. Wish they did it for all topics or at least halved the suggestion rate or whatever knob that is. Or split recent interest from long interests, with the ability to purge the former without plowing through history.

Do mewing next for the love of humanity; if I hear another 6yo talking about their jawline, I'm gonna lose it

Hey Google, here's a suggestion: how about you make it possible to restrict a kids' account to only be able to view certain channels, disabling "the algorithm" altogether? I'd even be willing to pay for that.

Of course, that would lead to kids seeing less videos, so that is apparently not an option, so while Google now tunes the algorithm a bit w.r.t. weight and fitness, it is of course no problem that any young boy wanting to see some gaming videos will still be led straightly to "Jordan Peterson destroying this feminist", Logan Paul shilling bullshit and Joe Rogan interviewing some nutjob and saying steroids are fine but vaccines are evil (yes, I'm paraphrasing).

So here we are, but fortunately, there's a solution: Disable Youtube everywhere except on a little Linux desktop PC, install freetube

https://freetubeapp.io/

Add channels that are fine, set a PIN for changing the channel list, and voila, a safe Youtube environment.

We published a preprint last year with an algorithm for content restriction that YouTube might find useful: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-3708350/v1

Essentially it's a dynamic regulator that restricts content based on one's recent viewing history. So the more somebody watches harmful content, the less it gets recommended to them. And it can be applied to any type of harmful content.

It's designed to oppose the positive feedback loops that lead to addiction.

what about all the crypto scams? all the state media sponsored propaganda?

This is sickening. If you don't have children, just let me tell you the videos they get recommended by Youtube are bizarre.

Weird Russian/Eastern European shows where actors act like kids in a classroom but with overt sexual overtones. The first time I saw one I legitimately thought she had stumbled on porn. There was no nudity or anything, more just the setup and way they dress and behave. Think basically the beginning of every terrible plot porn ever made. It was called Ratata if you're curious.

Minecraft and Roblox videos voiced over with themes like divorce, abortion, running away, suicide, etc. It's almost always voiced by some text to speech woman voice. It's all so weird I just blocked Youtube altogether.

But sure, let's go after that pesky...fitness stuff.

So muckbang videos are acceptable, but fitness videos aren't.. oh my

I would say probably the best thing to come out of the social media tiktok and instagram obsession has been a renewed focus on health: workout, diet, food, lifestyle, etc.

The fact that YouTube would announce this instead of just implementing behind the scenes is also shocking - they are getting bold with their manipulations

How about we not let dystopian megacorps paternalistically decide what we are and aren’t allowed to watch?

Can't have fitness videos.

But you CAN have all those processed food ads!

In fact, we INSIST that you watch all those processed food and pharma ads!

Just make sure you don't try to use any non-pharma ways of getting healthier!

It's able-ist to get fit!