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Comment by emkoemko | Hacker News Reader

since when has cursing been age restricted? i hear it all the time and videos are not age restricted even war footage from Ukraine shows horrible stuff no age restriction on most of them. There are those channels that bleep out the last second of the word so you know and heard exactly what they said, is that how they are getting around it?

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Seems like the year 1968 actually

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Association_fil...

Why should YouTube not try to abide by the same rules of industry they’ve done a pretty amazing job of destroying?

Whether they should or not is a different question than whether that's what their rules state and whether the standards should be clear

I would not really include the Ukraine footage in this discussion. Pretty much every media company has loosened their rules on this topic in the interest of allowing the free flow of information. There's a time-sensitivity that doesn't apply to child programming.

It's really really easy for one side to abuse the moderation system and get the other side silenced, when all the content is horrible.

>since when has cursing been age restricted?

Do you recall Mickey Mouse or Garfield or Charlie Brown dropping an F bomb?

No?

Exactly.

"Age restricted", in the context of terminology used by Youtube, specifically means 18+. Being age restricted heavily suppresses the video and, depending on country, watchers may be required to verify their age by credit card or sending an ID photo to Google.

Whether the video is "for kids" (under 13) is a separate matter. Generally a video like the one in the article would be not-for-kids, but also not age restricted.

Far as I'm concerned, any commercial product that contains swearing has nearly always been Rated M For Mature, which is a more verbose way to say 18+ only. Rated T for Teenagers and Rated E for Everyone straight up do not have swearing, period.

Amateur products have been the exception to this norm, because let's face it: The commons don't give a shit.

But platforms/publishers themselves are not the commons, they are businesses and they have legal liabilities: They do give a shit.

So while Youtube is asinine, flagging a video that contains swearing as Rated M (aka 18+) is reasonable. The only thing unreasonable is inconsistent enforcement. If something contains swearing, it's going in the 18+ Only bin.

I agree that the main problem is the fact that this rule is uncommunicated. As the creator of the video in the article said, they'd be fine with adjusting if they could. Instead, they complied with the publicly given rules and in return had a huge project arbitrarily suppressed.

> any commercial product that contains swearing has nearly always been Rated M For Mature, which is a more verbose way to say 18+ only. Rated T for Teenagers and Rated E for Everyone straight up do not have swearing, period.

Even in traditional media you can often get away with some swearing - especially with documentaries. Record for PG-13 movies is apparently Gunner Palace with 42 uses of "fuck".

> Rated T for Teenagers and Rated E for Everyone straight up do not have swearing, period

This is absolutely wrong. According to the ESRB website, T for Teen allows the infrequent use of strong language. This is a far cry from no swearing allowed at all.

Furthermore, the PG-13 rating for movies allows one use of the F-word per movie and more liberal use of less strong swears. So neither games or movies get rated 18+ only for swearing

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