YouTube

[LovingOliveWasp]

My little one is obsessed with becoming a YouTuber and it is a hard no from me.

A couple of people have suggested letting her have a private account for only her friends and family but even this gives me the ick and I feel once you put something online you loss control of the content.

She is only 6 years old and far too young to know about the dangers that are out there. Am I over thinking this or is a private account really private?

I have been told I am being overprotective but that is a badge I wear with pride and do not think being famous is something she should be aiming for ever let alone at 6 🫣

How does she even know about becoming a YouTuber???

A 6 year old should not know what a You tuber is let alone being obsessed by it.

I thought you were going to say they were 16…

Mine aren't allowed to watch YouTube at all, it's terrible developmentally.

Could she make videos without posting online

Why is your 6 year old even watching YouTube?

Yes I’m not sure how a 6 year old knows what a YouTuber is either, unless they have older siblings or cousins who have told them? It would be a hard no from me so I don’t think you’re being over protective.

Nothing on the internet is private.

Think your Facebook pictures are private because you have everything set to Friends only/tagging off/browser link off? Nope, still not private.

Tell your daughter to play pretend in front of a mirror like most of us did at that age

How on earth does she know what a youtuber is. I thought they were going to be a teenager not 6.

She has been listening to other languages on YouTube since she was born.

As a single language household I thought it would be beneficial to learn other languages.
She has weekly Mandarin and Spanish lessons but the real reason she is doing so well is because YouTube is on in the background at least one hour a day in each language.

She goes to school so has learned about other channels which she watches in the languages ie Sammy Slime which is arts & crafts channel etc

She now wants to create her own channel to teach people all about arts & crafts.

Even 10 years ago, I would have said that your 26 year old child would thank you for stopping her 6 year old self from putting cringey videos all over the internet.

20 years ago my friends and I were all joining Facebook when it was in its infancy, uploading pictures of every drunken night out in nightclubs, writing on each other's "walls" with a shocking amount of detail about our personal lives. Over the past 10 years or so we have all to varying degrees spent hours combing through our online activity and cleaning it as much as possible. But you can't delete photos someone else has uploaded to the internet. You can only untag them, hide your friends list, and hope that no one is ever motivated to comb through the less locked down albums of people you knew 15 years ago to find pictures of you when you were young and dumb, which could compromise you now. One of my friends has tried unsuccessfully to completely delete her Facebook profile and it still remains. Locked, and with a fake name, but she has failed to completely erase her online footprint.

YouTube is even worse. Every video contains thousands of frames which can be deconstructed. People who wanted to use video footage of you for nefarious purposes have not just your image but your voice, your mannerisms, possibly ways to find out your location. AI is already very sophisticated at creating deep fakes. It is probably already possible to take video footage of a 6 year old girl and make fake video footage of that girl as an adult, saying whatever you want her to say. If it isn't possible now, it certainly will be in the future. People might be able to use your 6 year old daughter's voice to create an adult approximation of her voice which is convincing enough to get through online banking ID checks. They can certainly already create very convincing fake images and videos of child sexual abuse with your daughter's face in them.

Your 6 year old doesn't understand any of this.

So you just have to be the parent and tell her that the answer is no.

And ideally no more YouTube full stop.

Also when she was 3, she came out of her art class in tears because she didn't have a tiktok.

No she still doesn't have a tictok (and neither do I) but they are learning about these things from a very young age.

She also wants to play Roadblox and Minecraft which again I have said no too.

Any time I take a video she is all about like and subscribe because that is how they play at school.

That is absolutely ridiculous.

Wtf is wrong with the parents of your child's friends?

My four year old doesn't even know that the internet exists.

It is scary how much they pick up from their friends.

I am glad I came on here though because I was beginning to doubt myself and cave on private account as so many people have been trying to convince me that 'she could at least have a private one'

I think they forget just how young she is.