Considering the online safety ramifications of making YouTube videos
When I helped out my daughter's class on her field trip to International Towne, one of the other students in my group was a middle schooler with her own YouTube video blog. She told me that she makes videos of herself daily talking about life in general or publishes videos on such topics as learning Japanese or the laws of thermodynamics for her educational channel. I'm not sure if she has one or two separate YouTube channels or if she uses her parents' channel. She mentioned that she would talk about her experience at International Towne in her next video. So I asked her if she had brought her video camera to get some International Towne footage. She told me no, because some people might be uncomfortable with video footage of themselves going up on YouTube.
This got me thinking about what exactly I need to be concerned about should my own children want to post videos on YouTube. They are very creative and have all kinds of ideas for either educational videos or plain fun videos. They've even brainstormed ideas like recording themselves playing Minecraft or other video games.
I'm not about to give them the green light to publish their videos online quite yet. However, I've decided it's time to start researching the issue so that I can be concerned about genuine issues, not be paranoid about bad stuff that is not likely to happen.
Today I read two articles about the subject, and have found them helpful as an initial summary of what a parent should keep in mind.
Some good advice to consider is to disable, or at least moderate, all YouTube comments, have the children not use their real names, or at least, only their first names. Some people have suggested they never show their own faces but instead use puppets. Others have said that the children should be able to show their faces but to be especially careful to not allow them to give away any information about where they live. Also, very important, there should be absolutely no sexual innuendo in any content that a child publishes, not even suggestive clothing, as that can attract sexual predators. Finally, it was repeatedly mentioned that of greater concern than potential danger from online predators is the fact that once a video of the child is out there, it's going to be available online into the child's adulthood, so it's important to make sure there is nothing about the video that could be a source of shame or embarrassment later on.
There are links in the articles to examples of children making videos with various parental restrictions like that. I may need to spend some time watching those videos, possibly with my children.
Must read for parents with daughters on YouTube
Is it safe to let kids put their original videos on YouTube?
It's good to know that for the most part, it seems that children who make YouTube videos of themselves are safe as long as they take reasonable precautions and the parents are very much involved in monitoring what goes on--what content is published and what comments are allowed.
Reasonable people disagree on the extent of what are reasonable precautions and it's just going to take some time for me and my husband to figure out what we are going to be comfortable with.
Once I figure this out, I might even put out some videos of myself talking about things I enjoy, like cryptocurrencies, or Montessori presentations, theology... pretty much anything, really. And of course I would link to them here :)
It's great to know that there is a way to have a public presence safely.