TL;DR
- YouTube shared its plan earlier this year to begin using AI to flag accounts that may not be in use by adults.
- Enforcement began over the summer, with flagged users asked to submit documentation verifying their ages.
- This week a new wave of accounts is being targeted, and users are once again upset.
What’s the most controversial thing Google has done so far in 2025? From AI ethics to antitrust issues, we’ve got no shortage of topics to talk about there, but for YouTube viewers, one of the biggest has got to be the decision to start requiring users to provide proof that they’re adults. We finally saw that effort get underway a few months back, and now it looks like there’s another big wave of accounts getting flagged.
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At its core, this has been framed from day one as an effort to protect YouTube’s youngest viewers. The platform has numerous safeguards designed to keep experiences age-appropriate for kids, but those are only going to be effective when the service knows which accounts are being used by adults and which aren’t. To address that gap, Google’s been leveraging AI in an attempt to estimate viewer age based on account activity.
If it suspects your viewing history seems more like that of a teen than an adult, you’ll be given the opportunity to establish your age by sharing a credit card number (which will just be checked that it’s real, not charged), a scan of your ID, or by taking a selfie (hopefully you don’t look young, too).
YouTube viewers have been extremely vocal in their reactions to this whole scheme across social media, expressing a mix of privacy concerns and just general resentment at being forced to jump through hoops like this.
While it’s easy to understand where a lot of those feelings are coming from, we can also appreciate why Google thinks this is necessary — and to be fair, it’s not like the company owes unpaid YouTube viewers anything in the first place. If you want to keep watching adult-oriented content on Google’s platform, that’s just going to mean playing by its rules, like it or not. And while this week may represent the most recent big push to ask users to verify their age, you can bet that it won’t be the last.
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