Children's Online Privacy Protection Act

Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA for short) is a United States federal law and upcoming YouTube feature that is enacted on October 21, 1998, and became effective on April 21, 2000. COPPA on YouTube as a feature is a setting that if a channel is made for kids or not.

History
On September 4, 2019, the FTC issued a fine of $170 million to YouTube for COPPA violations, including tracking viewing history of minors in order to facilitate targeted advertising. As a result, YouTube announced that as part of the settlement, in 2020 it would require channel operators to mark videos that are "child-oriented" as such, and would use machine learning to automatically mark those as clearly "child-oriented" if not marked already. In the settlement terms, channel operators that failed to mark videos as "child-oriented" could be fined by the FTC for up to $42,000 per video, which has raised criticism towards the settlement terms.

The whole feature of YouTube gained criticism and concerning comments coming from smaller and bigger creators alike, not knowing of their channel and videos are made for kids or not. They also said that the fine is very concerning and disastrous. This lead to some creators to private most of their videos (e.g. Crunchphibia), etc.

What counts as "made for kids"

 * Children or children’s characters.
 * Popular children’s programming or animated characters.
 * Play-acting, or stories using children’s toys.
 * Child protagonists engaging in common natural play patterns such as play-acting and/or imaginative play.
 * Popular children’s songs, stories or poems.

What happens if you set your channel/videos as "made for kids"

 * The video won't get any notifications if the video is uploaded.
 * The video won't get recommended.
 * The video won't be searchable.
 * The comments on the video will be disabled.
 * The video won't make any money, from ads, etc.

This will also apply to an older video.