YouTube doesn't allow content that endangers the emotional and physical wellbeing of minors. A minor is someone under 18 years old.
If you find content that violates this policy, report it. If you believe that a child is in danger, you should get in touch with your local law enforcement to report the situation immediately.
Instructions for reporting violations of our Community Guidelines are available here. If you've found multiple videos or comments that you would like to report, you can report the channel.
What this policy means for you
If you're posting content
Don't post content on YouTube if it fits any of the descriptions noted below.
- Sexualisation of minors: Sexually explicit content featuring minors and content that sexually exploits minors, including minor nudity posted with comedic intent. We report content containing child sexual abuse imagery to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, who work with global law enforcement agencies.
- Harmful or dangerous acts involving minors: Content showing a minor participating in dangerous activities or encouraging minors to perform dangerous activities, particularly if someone watching could imitate the dangerous act or if the content encourages or praises the dangerous act. Never put minors in harmful situations that may lead to injury, including dangerous stunts, challenges, dares or pranks. Dangerous acts include, but are not limited to, any act in the categories listed under Extremely dangerous challenges, such as asphyxiation or electrocution.
- Examples include content that shows minors:
- Drinking alcohol
- Using vaporisers, e-cigarettes, tobacco or marijuana
- Misusing fireworks
- Using firearms unsupervised
- Examples include content that shows minors:
- Inflicting or advocating for the infliction of physical, sexual or emotional maltreatment or neglect of a child, including inflicting emotional distress on minors.
- Content that contains infliction of physical, sexual or emotional abuse on a child within an educational, documentary, scientific or artistic context and with blurring may receive an exception.
- Content that could cause minor participants or viewers emotional distress, including:
- Exposing minors to mature themes
- Simulating parental abuse
- Coercing minors
- Violence
- Misleading family content: Content that targets young minors and families, but contains:
- Sexual themes
- Violence
- Obscenity or other mature themes that are not suitable for young audiences
- Medical procedures
- Self-harm
- Use of adult horror characters
- Other inappropriate themes that are intended to shock young audiences
- Content that targets young minors and families with age-inappropriate themes within an educational, documentary, scientific or artistic context may receive an exception. This is not a green light to target young minors and families with mature themes intended to shock young audiences.
- Family-friendly cartoons that target young minors and contain adult or age-inappropriate themes such as violence, sex, death, drugs and more. We don't allow content labelled as suitable for children in the video's title, description, tags or in the audience selection if it contains age-inappropriate themes.
- Make sure that your titles, descriptions and tags match the audience that you're targeting. In addition, ensure that your audience selection accurately represents the audience that your content is suitable for. You can also age-restrict your content upon upload if it's intended for mature audiences.
- Cyberbullying and harassment involving minors: Content that:
- Intends to shame, deceive or insult a minor
- Reveals personal information like email addresses or bank account numbers
- Contains sexualisation
- Encourages others to bully or harass
This policy applies to videos, video descriptions, comments, Stories, Community posts, live streams, playlists and any other YouTube product or feature. Bear in mind that this isn't a complete list.
Please note that these policies also apply to external links in your content. This can include clickable URLs, verbally directing users to other sites in video, as well as other forms.
We may add an age restriction to content that includes any of the following:
- Harmful or dangerous acts that adults or minors could imitate: Content containing adults participating in dangerous activities that adults or minors could easily imitate.
- Note: Simply saying 'Don't try this at home' may not result in an exception. Learn more about age-restricted harmful or dangerous content.
- Adult themes in family content: Content meant for adult audiences but that could easily be confused with family content. This includes cartoons that contain adult themes such as violence, sex or death. Remember, you can age restrict your content upon upload if it's intended for mature audiences.
- Vulgar language: Some language is not appropriate for younger audiences. Content using sexually explicit language or excessive profanity may lead to age restriction.
- Comments
- Live chat
- Live streaming
- Video recommendations (how and when your video is recommended)
- Community posts
- Shorts Video remixing
How to protect minors in your content
Before posting content of yourself, your family or friends, think carefully about whether it may put anyone at risk of negative attention. Minors are a vulnerable population and YouTube has policies to protect them from unwanted attention.
- Make sure that the minor is supervised by an adult and is performing age-appropriate activities such as demonstrating hobbies, educational content or public performances.
- Make sure that the attire worn is age-appropriate. Avoid attire that overexposes the minor or is form-fitting.
- Use YouTube's privacy settings to limit who can see the videos that you post.
Don't post content on YouTube that features minors and meets one or more of the following:
- Filmed in private spaces at home such as bedrooms or bathrooms.
- Features minors soliciting contact from strangers, dares or challenges online or discussing adult topics.
- Shows activities that could draw undesired attention to the minor, such as performing body contortions or ASMR.
- Reveals personal details about a minor.
These are just some examples; you can get more best practices for child safety here. If you are under 18 or the applicable age of majority in your country, Be Internet Awesome can help you be safe online.
Examples
Here are some examples of content that is not allowed on YouTube.
- Videos or posts featuring minors involved in provocative, sexual or sexually suggestive activities, challenges and dares, such as kissing or groping.
- Showing minors who are involved in dangerous activities. For example, physical stunts, using weapons or explosives or using a controlled substance like alcohol or nicotine including use of vapes or e-cigarettes.
- A video with tags like 'for children' or whose audience is set to 'Yes, it's Made for Kids', featuring family-friendly cartoons engaging in inappropriate acts like injecting needles.
Remember, these are just some examples and don't post content if you think that it might violate this policy.
More examples
- Offering money, praise, likes or any other incentive to a minor to participate in physical contact with someone else.
- A video or post that advertises sexual content featuring minors or abusive content featuring minors.
- Predatory behaviour involving communications with or about minors.
- Aggregating innocent content of minors for the purposes of sexual gratification.
- Fight or bullying content featuring children without educational, documentary, scientific or artistic context and blurring.
- Challenges, pranks or stunts that pose the risk of physical injury or serious emotional distress. You can learn more about what's not allowed in our policies around challenges and pranks.
- Encouraging minors to participate in dangerous activities, even if there are no minors in the content.
- Content simulating parental abuse or abandonment, simulating exposure to death or violence or causing minors intense shame or humiliation.
- Using cartoons, puppets or family entertainment characters to appeal to children where content features adult themes like violence and sex.
What happens if content violates this policy
If your content violates this policy, we will remove the content and send you an email to let you know. If we can't verify that a link that you post is safe, we may remove the link. Note that violative URLs posted within the video itself or in the video's metadata may result in the video being removed.
If this is the first time that you've violated our community guidelines, you'll most likely get a warning with no penalty to your channel. You will have the chance to take policy training to allow the warning to expire after 90 days. The 90-day period starts from when the training is completed, not when the warning is issued. However, if the same policy is violated within that 90-day window, the warning will not expire and your channel will be given a strike. If you violate a different policy after completing the training, you will get another warning.
If you get three strikes within 90 days, your channel will be terminated. Learn more about our strikes system.
We may terminate your channel or account for repeated violations of the Community Guidelines or Terms of Service. We may also terminate your channel or account after a single case of severe abuse or when the channel is dedicated to a policy violation. We may prevent repeat offenders from taking policy training in the future. Learn more about channel or account terminations.
We have zero tolerance for predatory behaviour on YouTube. If we think that a child is in danger based on reported content, we'll help law enforcement investigate the content.