Watching online videos has become a popular pastime for both parents and kids. However, dads and moms often have internet safety concerns about the content in these videos that their children are viewing. In this episode of The Lab, Daddy Clay takes the Safety Mode from YouTube for a test drive and checks out these new parental controls. How well do they work? Will they keep your kids from seeing violence, bad language, and sex? Find out as we search for Spongebob Squarepants and Dora the Explorer videos. Are other video sites like Kideos and PBS Kids a better alternative? DadLabs Ep. 607 is brought to you by BabyBjorn.

Daddy Clay: YouTube recently rolled out a new parental control feature they're calling Safety Mode. Let's take it for a test drive.

Ecotec-certified BabyBjorn is safe no matter what kind of videos you're watching. BabyBjorn. And this frontward facing position is great for watching YouTube videos with your kid.

Now, in general, I'm pretty suspicious of YouTube and I don't use it very much with my kids. But it is the most ubiquitous website for watching videos. You're gonna get in a pinch and there's always a laptop or an iPhone around that's enabled for viewing YouTube videos. So, now we're going to take a look at this parental control feature and see if it really helps us to filter out the content we find on YouTube for our kids.

Really, the best thing about YouTube's safety mode is how easy it is to turn on. All you have to do is go to the bottom of any YouTube page and right there in tiny little blue letters, it says safety mode is off. Click on that, turn it on, and save. You can also save and lock that as your default so that every time you launch YouTube, you're in safety mode. So it does a really good job of filtering out explicit terms, bad language, drug references, and violence out of the videos that have that in their title or in their metadata.

We can demonstrate that by taking a look at the DadLabs catalog. There's this really funny episode that Owen did a while back called "How to have sex with your wife when your wife doesn't want to have sex." So you can see when I click on that video, it screens it, we get a message, "This video is unavailable with Safety Mode enabled." So, let's go back to the home page of YouTube. From here, we're just going to throw in a couple of search terms that you might want to use when you're looking for videos with your kids.

Let's try something innocent, like Spongebob. Looking at the results that come up even with safety mode on, I'm not having a lot of confidence in this filter. If you'll notice, the second result is Spongebob Hemp-Pants. I don't know if you've seen Spongebob Hemp-Pants but it's basically a little pot smoking Spongebob. The screening of the results here is not very strong. This is definitely not something that you want to turn your kids loose on without direct adult supervision. You may block the very worst content, the most explicit, the most graphic, but there's still plenty that can slip through the system.

Let's try a couple of other search terms. Here we have a little bit better luck. It's Dora the Explorer Christmas episode, Dora the Explorer Candyland, Dora the Explorer Crank That Soulja Boy. In a related search, it's the video Dora Likes Heroin.
Dora: I like heroin!
Daddy Clay: I can't imaging why people wouldn't just spend their whole day on YouTube with their kids.

One of the things that safety mode does handle is it hides comments. So when you click on a video to watch the video, the comment stream isn't immediately visible. And we know that some of the worst content on YouTube happens in the comment stream. It is possible, however, to view comments by just clicking on them. They've taken all the really obscene words and replaced them with asterisks. So again, blocking out the bad words with asterisks is just now that powerful of a  tool. I'd like to see comments completely blocked and disabled.

Let's try something really innocent like Sesame Street. I really don't see any mashups or any really objectionable content in any of those results. They've done a good job of cleaning that up.

But what if you've got a kid that's really curious. They're left alone for a second and they want to type in something they want to know some more about. Something more graphic like having sex. When you type in having sex, obviously the results here are pretty graphic. You've got YouTube having sex in the shower, cute girl having sex, etc. etc. Exactly what you'd expect. This exposure enough makes me feel like this product is a little bit sketchy. I click on it and I hope that it's being screened but as you can see, even this hasn't been screened.

I'd really like to report that safety mode on YouTube is a huge advance making it much easier for parents to search videos on YouTube safely with their kids but unfortunately, this has got to be a big fat fair. Is it possible to let your kids surf YouTube without adult supervision? No, I don't think so. And I'm not even sure it's safe with parent's supervision. You're still likely to come across some content that'll be upsetting to you and to your kids. I think what you're looking for is curative content specifically for kids. Kideos is a good example and also those trusted sources like PBS Kids, Nick.com.

I think this is another example of how careful as parents we've got to be when we're looking for videos online for our kids to consume. We want to thank our sponsors BabyBjorn. Safety in a box - BabyBjorn.