Since the release of Netflix's new horror film, Bird Box, a lot of people have been putting on blindfolds and doing things like driving their cars, crossing the street or cooking food, all to post on the internet as under the name #birdboxchallenge. YouTube has decided they've had enough of people risking their lives to get a viral video on their platform and so, have released their "Dangerous Challenges and Pranks Enforcement Update."
The update is to a few areas, one of which is their "external guidleines," which they've updated to make it clear that 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." They've also tweaked their "policies prohibiting harmful and dangerous content," which includes
pranks with a perceived danger of serious physical injury. We don’t allow pranks that make victims believe they’re in serious physical danger – for example, a home invasion prank or a drive-by shooting prank. We also don’t allow pranks that cause children to experience severe emotional distress, meaning something so bad that it could leave the child traumatized for life.
Although causes of trauma for individuals are a hard thing to legislate, YouTube has apparently done their best, working "directly with child psychologists to develop guidelines around the types of pranks that cross this line." Specifically, they single out some obvious examples, like "the fake death of a parent or severe abandonment or shaming for mistakes."
Watch some examples of the Bird Box challenge that may not exist in two months (Jake Paul's has already been removed), the scheduled end of the "clean up" period:
