Bird Box Challenge Leads YouTube To Strengthen Policy Against Dangerous Videos

YouTube announced Tuesday it was making the rules against the dangerous and harmful videos posted on the platform more stringent. The move came in the wake of the Bird Box challenge, which takes its name from the Neflix film “Bird Box”— in which the characters have to remain blindfolded in order to stay alive.

As part of the challenge, people go about their lives and ordinary tasks wearing blindfolds, often with terrible consequences, such as the 17-year-old girl from Layton, Utah, who tried driving a car blindfolded and ended up ramming into another vehicle and a light post.

In a blog post, YouTube said, “challenges like the Tide pod challenge or the Fire challenge, that can cause death and/or have caused death in some instances, have no place on YouTube. 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.”

The platform also prohibited prank videos that would trick people into believing “they are in serious physical danger, or cause children to experience severe emotional distress.”

According to another blog post by YouTube, the platform would keep an eye on not only on the videos but also on thumbnails, comments, links etc. that were likely to provoke people to try risky challenges.

It read, “YouTube’s Community Guidelines set the rules of the road for what we don’t allow on YouTube and not only apply to videos but all content, including comments, thumbnails, links, posts, live chat, etc. For example, we do not allow pornography, incitement to violence, harassment, or hate speech in any form on YouTube.”

The platform gave two months of “grace period” for the creators to remove the offending content from their channels. Those channels found to not abide by the rules would get a “Community Guideline Strike,” and 3 strikes in 90 days would result in termination of the channel.

Rules against such videos were already present on the platform, but given the huge surge in such kind of pranks likely to cause physical harm, the platform made the consequences explicitly clear to stop people from posting such videos.

Earlier this month, Netflix also issued a warning and asked fans of "Bird Box" to not participate in the internet trend that could endanger their lives.

It said, "Can't believe I have to say this, but: PLEASE DO NOT HURT YOURSELVES WITH THIS BIRD BOX CHALLENGE [sic]. We don't know how this started, and we appreciate the love, but Boy and Girl have just one wish for 2019 and it is that you not end up in the hospital due to memes."