Webinars
MSI Webinar: COPPAcalypse? The YouTube Settlement’s Impact on Child-Directed Content
We examine the tradeoff between privacy and personalization for online content by evaluating the impact of YouTube’s settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Under the settlement, YouTube removed all forms of personalization for child-directed content starting in January 2020, which included personalized ads and platform features like personalized search and recommendations. We study the resulting impact on 5,066 top American YouTube channels by comparing the child-directed content creators to their non-child-directed counterparts using a difference-in-differences design. On the supply side, we find that child-directed content creators produce 18% less content and pivot towards producing non-child-directed content. Child-directed content creators also invest less in content quality: the proportion of original content falls by 11% and manual captioning falls by 27%, while user content ratings fall by 10%. On the demand side, views of child-directed channels fall by 20%. Consistent with the platform’s degraded capacity to match viewers to content, both content creation and content views become more concentrated among top child-directed YouTube channels.
speaker
Tesary Lin is the Isabel Anderson Career Development Assistant Professor of Marketing at Boston University, a Junior Faculty Fellow at the Hariri Institute for Computing, and a Faculty Affiliate of the Technology & Policy Research Initiative. Her research focuses on how information and data moderate the relationship between firms and consumers. Specific topics include consumer privacy preferences and their impacts on firm analytics, analytics tools that adapt to the privacy-first data landscape, and how companies use choice architecture to moderate consumers' data sharing decisions. For her work in privacy and consumer data, Lin has been a recipient of the John D.C. Little Best Paper Award, the Alessandro di Fiore Best Paper Award, the Sheth Foundation ISMS Doctoral Dissertation Award, and the MSI Alden G. Clayton Doctoral Dissertation Award.