YouTube is a social media platform that allows its user to share videos online from all around the globe, in this blog we describe what is YouTube restricted mode is and how to turn it off. Thanks to its popularity it’s the second most visited website with more than one billion active users. On this platform, more than one billion hours of different videos are watched by its users every day.
There are many different types of content that are available on YouTube, and make this platform so popular among people. But this also means that some of the content on this platform is not suitable for children who might be using YouTube for either educational purposes or for using it for fun.
Fortunately, YouTube recognizes videos or content which are age-restricted and gives its viewer a warning when they are trying to watch such a video. In fact, a black page that you can see below will appear asking the users to sign in because the content might not be suitable.
What is exactly YouTube restricted mode, and how does it work?
Restricted Mode is an optional feature on YouTube which you can use. If you enable it, you will no longer see any inappropriate content such as nudity, hatred, violence, dangerous or any other mature stuff on your device. If you activate this feature YouTube will check any kind of unsuitable content or in other words any age-restricted videos. As you see below, when you activate this mode, you can not access the comments section, and the Restricted Mode actually hides the comment section on your browser.
When You try to enable this feature YouTube says that this is not 100% accurate, which means that it could not filter all mature videos, and they may still appear on the screen. And the reason that this happens is that users upload hundreds if not thousand hours of videos per minute on YouTube.
Also if you have enabled this feature on your device let’s say your laptop that feature is only for your laptop. Even if you installed more than one browser on your laptop that doesn’t work on every one of them, so you need to go over the same process on each browser separately and enable Restricted Mode on them. Also once you have enabled that feature no one can disable it until you sign out from the platform and again sign in to be able to disable it. This is also very helpful to keep your children away from harmful content which is age-restricted.
Enabling YouTube restricted mode
Enabling this feature on your device is not a hard thing to do. If you follow the steps in the next section of the article you will see how easy it is that you can do it without any difficulty.
How to enable restricted mode on PC or Laptop?
- First, go to the YouTube website, at the top right corner. Sign in and since Google supports YouTube you need to have a Gmail to do so.
- Sign in again, and click at the top right corner and look for “restricted mode.”
- Then a small window like what you see below will pop up. Now, you need to do is to tap on “activate restricted mode”.
When you do this process, you activate YouTube Restricted Mode and mature content won’t appear in most cases but as we said before some content that is unwelcome for kids to watch may still be appeared on the screen.
Remember that in order to disable this mode you need to sign out first and then sign in again.
How to enable restricted mode on Android or on ios?
In three easy steps, you will learn how to do this. Open the YouTube app on your Android or ios device. Then go to setting and then go to general, from there tap on restricted mode and then toggle it on.
- Go to the setting on Youtube
2. Click on the general menu
3. Turn off the restriction mode
What to do if YouTube is already on restricted mode?
There are times when we are surfing YouTube and to our amazement, we find out that we cannot watch some age-restricted videos. This usually happens when we are using a computer in public places such as a library, university, school and so on. Here the restricted mode may be enabled and what we can do is to ask the system administrator and there is nothing else we can do. Also sometimes when you are surfing YouTube for the first time or when you are not signed in you may not be able to watch some age-restricted content. But here you can simply turn the restricted mode on or off by what you have already learned from this article.
What is the restricted mode good for?
As an adult, we may be ok to watch whatever content exist on YouTube, but in order to keep our family especially our children away from watching content that they are not supposed to watch this mode is a wonderful optional feature. It also helps us to make sure about our children. They will not watch any unsuitable content whether it be nudity or any other bad stuff. Besides this restricted mode there is also an app called “YouTube Kids”. YouTube develop this app and here there is no restricted mode however, our children can not watch stuff that they are not supposed to watch.
Conclusion
YouTube is a famous social media platform with more than one billion users from all over the world and it is such a wonderful and vast source of content that there is nothing YouTube doesn’t cover, yet there is unsuitable content on this user-friendly platform that may not be suitable for our kids to watch. Any way to stop those kinds of disturbing content such as nudity, hatred, mature stuff and so on we can simply enable restricted mode so that our kids be safe and never ever be able to watch bad stuff. Hopefully, this article helped you gain some insight into YouTube Restricted Mode and the way it works.
