Another Reason to Install YouTube Safety Mode
49-year-old David Rock, a sex offender on YouTube who has 102,000 subscribers on his channel, Davidsfarm, was just recently “booted off” YouTube.
An article in the Toronto Sun pointed out that back in the early 90s, Rock was convicted of several sexual assaults on teenage boys. He pleaded guilty to seven, and four more were dropped—the result: one year in jail. Since then he has become a YouTube “partner”, which is essentially a member who receives a cut of the ads sold to his channel. Rock would post video clips that showed him doings stunts with the vehicles he modified at his farm in Ontario. Total, his videos have received more than 15 million views from a fan base that was largely made up of teenage boys—coincidence? I think not.
In October, Rock received a lot of media attention about his convictions, and as a result, YouTube/Google put his channel on lockdown, meaning that content could only be viewed and not added. Now, apparently, he’s booted off for good.
Parents, like the title says, this is just another reason why it’s important to setup YouTube’s Safety Mode. The site is just too popular among kids and teens to not do it. As a mother of five, I know I can’t stop my kids from entirely watching videos on YouTube; but I know I can do my best to control when and where they have access (i.e. screened videos on Yoursphere or not allowing YouTube on my 10 year-olds safety-enabled iPod Touch, for instance) and have some piece of mind knowing that there’s an active filter on there.
Here’s how you set it up:
Go to the computer that your kids use, and visit YouTube.com.
The first thing you want to do is log into your Google account. This should be YOUR account, not one that you share with your child. This will allow you to lock Safety Mode so that your tech savvy kids can’t unlock it themselves.
Also note: Most people tend to have autofill enabled when it comes to email or social network usernames and password. This is contradictory to setting up YouTube’s Safety Mode. If this is the case for you, follow this quick and easy guide.
Now that you’ve logged in scroll all the way down to the bottom of the YouTube homepage, look for the link that says “Safety Mode: Off”, and click the “Off” link.
In the box that pops up, click the “On” radio button, and then click on “Save and lock safety mode on this browser”. Doing this will ensure that, even if you’re logged out, Safety Mode will stay on.
Another thing to keep in mind, it only stays locked on that particular web browser and on that particular computer user account. So if each of your kids has their own user account on the home computer, make sure you remember to enable Safety Mode for each user. Additionally, if you don’t have the time to activate Safety Mode on all the browsers being used (regardless of account), you need to uninstall multiple browsers on your home computer.
In the end, we parents need to do all we can to keep our kids safe. We can’t rely on YouTube or Google to do that—not that it’s an excuse to knowingly allow a sexual predator on their site, but they have hundreds of millions of members, and even more content, to monitor—so we need to do it ourselves as a way to ensure the safety of our children when they’re using these services.
Category: Safety, Tech Benefits
Mary Kay is a nationally-recognized Internet safety expert and the founder of 
