YouTube tests blurred miniatures for “mature content”

YouTube has announced a new experimental feature that “was aimed at providing safer research experiences for all users”. The service will start to blur the vignettes in the search results for certain requests “which frequently include sex themes”. According to a Recent update in the community section of the YouTube Help Center Website, the functionality is currently deployed on a small percentage of viewers.

There are no details on what the sex themes can trigger a search to return a list of videos with blurred miniatures, but YouTube says that the title of the video, the name of the channel and its description will remain visible. Viewers will also have the opportunity to unpack miniatures.

The objective of the deployment of limited test is to “understand if this type of functionality helps users to accidentally avoid content which follows the community directives of YouTube but can be of a sensitive nature.” But unlike SafeSearch which can both blur and filter the results on Google’s search engine, the new experimental functionality of YouTube does not omit the results. In its current form, it is rather designed to provide an additional protective layer which prevents younger users or without distrust from being immediately presented with content that can be inappropriate.