# Children's Safety on YouTube: A Systematic Review
###### Abstract
Additionally, on YouTube Kids, the levels of restrictions are classified as: preschoolers starting from age 2 to 4, young children ages 5 to 8, and older children aged 8 to 12 years. To further explore this matter, based on the statistics for 2022, the top channel watched by kids is ChuChu TV Nursery Rhymes and Kids Songs, which has 57.5 million young subscribers. However, YouTube Kids is still not a strong platform that can prevent inappropriate or disturbing videos to kids [17; 18; 19; 20; 21; 22; 23] due to the increasing number of YouTube channels/videos or user-generated comments. In addition, the decision algorithms rely on the meta-data of videos that are uploaded by YouTube. Additionally, there are many sites or advertisements not suitable for children that are in the form of visual, audio, and textual content, or through URL links that can be added to YouTube videos through user-generated comments. Such content may appear suddenly while children or adolescents browse educational videos or accidentally click on them. These videos or links contain embedded messages that can negatively impact children. Unfortunately, children will not know that these videos are harmful to them. In this way, regardless of the advantages of the internet, online activities, or YouTube videos, they become a grave danger to a child's mentality and behavior. They are also considered risky to childhood development as health problems such as aggressive thoughts and feelings affect kids' growth. This is due to some of the videos having illegal and inappropriate content, such as child abuse, violence, gambling, horror sounds, scary scenes, and abusive language. Such content is believed to be unsafe for children if no control or monitoring is in place [24]. Therefore, in the last few years, Machine Learning (ML) [25; 26; 27; 28; 29; 30; 31; 32], Deep Learning (DL) [15; 33; 34; 35; 36; 37; 38; 39; 40; 41; 42; 43; 44], and Natural Language Processing (NLP) [45; 46; 47; 48; 49; 50; 51; 52; 53; 54; 55] researchers and scientists have contributed to proposing methods, approaches, techniques, and tools to ensure the safety of children on social media, particularly on online videos. Hence, this study aims to conduct a Systematic Review (SR) to provide an overview of the existing methods, tools, techniques, and approaches that were proposed or developed scholarly to protect, prevent, and save kids from inappropriate or illegal video content. The main key stages of conducting a systematic review are followed by the formulation of research questions, identifying inclusion and exclusion criteria, identifying the source materials (electronicdatabases), study section, results, and summarization. This study answers three Research Questions (RQs). They are:  
**RQ1**: What are the issues and threats that kids encounter on YouTube videos? **RQ2**: What are the existing methods, techniques, and approaches used to protect and prevent inappropriate YouTube video content? **RQ3**: What are the challenges in protecting kids from inappropriate content on YouTube videos? To answer the RQs of this SR, the inclusion and exclusion criteria are identified as follows: (1) Retrieved research papers and articles that are published in IEEE Xplore Digital Library, ACM Digital Library, Springer database, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and ScienceDirect electronic databases. (2) Research papers and articles are written in the English language only. (3) The period of paper publication is between January 2016 and December 2022. (4) Research papers and articles that are related to web videos and YouTube videos from a cybersecurity perspective. (5) Papers that were published in conferences and articles published in indexed databases. (6) Articles and papers that are relevant to machine learning, deep learning, and cybersecurity, in general, which are relevant to computing or information technology research areas. (7) Books, theses, and notes are excluded in this SR.