() — YouTube on Tuesday announced a series of changes to the way it treats content related to eating disorders.
The platform has long since removed content that glorifies or promotes eating disorders, and community guidelines from Youtube they will also now ban content that features behaviors like purging after eating or extreme calorie counting that at-risk users might be inspired to imitate. For videos that exhibit such “imitable behaviors” in the context of fetching, YouTube will allow the content to remain on the site, but will restrict it to users who are logged in to the site and are 18 years of age or older.
The new policy, developed in consultation with the National Eating Disorders Association and other non-profit organizations, aims to ensure that “YouTube creates a space for community recovery and resources, while continuing to protect our viewers.” ,” YouTube’s global head of healthcare Garth Graham told in an interview.
“We are thinking about how to thread the needle in terms of essential conversations and information that people can have,” Graham said, “allowing people to hear stories about recovery and allowing people to hear educational information, but also realizing that the display of that information… can also serve as a trigger.”
Social networks and eating disorders
The changes come as social media platforms have faced a increased scrutiny for its effects on the mental health of users, especially young people. In 2021, lawmakers criticized instagram and YouTube for promoting accounts with content featuring extreme weight loss and diets for young users.
TikTok has faced criticism from an online safety group that claimed the app served eating disorder-related content to teens (although the platform rejected the research). They also follow several updates from YouTube in the past few years about how it handles the misinformation about medical issues like abortion and vaccines.
In addition to removing or restricting the age of some videos, YouTube plans to add panels pointing viewers to crisis resources under eating disorder-related content in nine countries, with plans to expand to more areas. And when a creator’s video is removed for violating his eating disorder policy, Graham said YouTube will send them resources on how to create content that is less likely to harm other viewers.
As with many social media policies, however, the challenge is often not in introducing them but in enforcing them, a challenge YouTube could face when discerning which videos are, for example, pro-recovery. YouTube said it will roll out enforcement of the policy globally in the coming weeks and plans to use both human and automated moderation to review videos and their context.
“These are [problemas] complicated public health issues,” Graham said, “I don’t want to ever profess perfection, but to understand that we have to be proactive, we have to be thoughtful…it’s taken a while to get here because we wanted to articulate a process that had different layers and understood the challenges”.
