By Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
YouTube is updating its cyberbullying and harassment policies and will no longer allow content that “realistically simulates” minors and other victims of crimes narrating their deaths or the violence they experienced.
The update appears to take aim at a genre of content in true crime circles that creates disturbing AI-powered depictions of victims — including children — that then describe the violence against them. Some of the videos use AI-generated, childlike voices to describe gruesome violence that occurred in high-profile cases. Families of victims depicted in the videos have called the content “disgusting.”
YouTube’s policy update will result in a strike that removes the content from a channel and also temporarily limits what a…