Trolling music fans into subscribing to its paid service is just one of the new features you can expect from YouTube, although not all of them are as annoying as watching more ads between music clips.
The company has decided to take a hard stance on videos that promote gun modifications, tutorials, and ban all videos that link directly to sites that sell weapons or accessories like bump stocks.
Videos that show you how to build a gun or install one of the dreaded bump-stock devices, which transform certain rifles into fully-automatic weapons, will be banned from the site.
The new rules will be enforced this April, Google explained in a support document on its website.
“We routinely make updates and adjustments to our enforcement guidelines across all of our policies,“ a YouTube spokeswoman told The Wall Street Journal.
“While we’ve long prohibited the sale of firearms, we recently notified creators of updates we will be making around content promoting the sale or manufacture of firearms and their accessories.”
Google already had in place rules that ban videos that explicitly promote the sale of guns, and the company started restricting videos that advertise bump stock devices last October, after the Las Vegas massacre.
The new rules have arrived in the wake of last month’s Parkland shooting that reignited the gun debate.
The NRA did not comment on the matter, but some content creators aren’t happy. InRange TV co-owner Karl Kasarda told The Journal that the rules are broadly written giving Google the power to censor whatever it wants.
“Their policies are not very clear-cut, and they are arbitrary,” Kasarda said. “You never know when you are going to get hit by them.” He added that he can’t tell whether the new policy prohibits videos that show you how to load a magazine into a gun.
On the other hand, not having videos at hand instructing you how to use a gun “properly” isn’t such a bad idea.
