For years people have been making dangerous “prank” videos and sharing them on YouTube hoping to see the videos go viral.
A lot of those dangerous videos did end up going viral, inspiring thousands of copycats to attempt to recreate the prank.
As one might expect, many of those copycat pranksters ended up getting seriously hurt while filming their own versions of the stunts.
Things became even worse when the prank video makers started actually challenging viewers to make similar videos of their own.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), this situation recently came to a head after a young lady crashed her car while driving blindfolded while she was creating a video in response to the dangerous “Bird Box” challenge that’s so popular at the moment.
That incident prompted YouTube to make the decision to ban dangerous prank and challenge videos from their site.
YouTube released an update to their FAQs on January 16 that includes the following statement:
“We’ve made it clear that our policies prohibiting harmful and dangerous content
also extend to pranks with a perceived danger of serious physical injury. We don’t
allow pranks that make victims believe they’re in serious physical danger – for
example, a home invasion prank or a drive-by shooting prank. We also don’t allow
pranks that cause children to experience severe emotional distress, meaning
something so bad that it could leave the child traumatized for life.”
The FAQ goes on to state that YouTube is giving users who have uploaded dangerous videos two months to remove them without incurring a penalty for them.
After the 2 month grace period ends anyone caught with this type of video on their channel will either be sanctioned or have their YouTube account shut down.
Of course this will cause some YouTube content creators to lose a LOT of money because they literally make and share these videos for a living.
But that being said, I believe this is a great move by YouTube. After all, a lot of people have been seriously hurt or killed during the filming of these videos, and many of the victims were innocent bystanders who were in no way connected to the prank/challenge or its filming.
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