YouTube Restricted Mode: What Is It and How to Enable It?

Implemented in 2010, Restricted (or Safe) Mode on YouTube is an optional setting that allows you to block potentially adult content from appearing in your YouTube account. With this mode, you’ll be able to curate the content that is recommended to your kids, minors, and so on.

If your children and minors are grown enough to watch YouTube kids but you still want to filter out potentially harmful content, keep on reading these 4K Download Team’s recommendations.

What is Restricted Mode about?

As YouTube themselves claim, Restricted Mode “helps hide potentially mature videos” and is not 100% accurate. With this mode, you can effortlessly mute unwanted and potentially harmful content. Safe Mode blocks all the restricted videos and will not show these even if you search for them. Besides, with the setting on, you are not capable of seeing comments on videos.

Speaking of the restricted content. YouTube considers these types of videos as mature and blocks them from appearing in Recommended and Watch Next:

• Videos that contain strong, vulgar language.

• Content with drugs and alcohol abuse.

• Sexual and nude scenes. Though, educational content about sex may appear in Restricted Mode.

• Videos with violence, natural disasters, crime, war, injuries, terrorism, and so on.

How does Restricted Mode work?

After you turn Restricted Mode on (we’ll talk about how to do it below), YouTube algorithms start checking videos’ metadata, title, hashtags, and language that is used in a video. Once the check is done, and the restricted content is spotted, the smart algorithms decide to hide the videos from you.

Videos which were uploaded a while ago may not appear in Restricted Mode since the algorithms are reviewing them and they are not yet free to watch.

But at times, some videos are not available in Restricted Mode because of the age restriction applied by YouTube human reviewers.

Are Restricted Mode and age-restricted content the same thing?

Generally, Restricted Mode is not the same as age-gating. Age-restricted content is not available to users who are signed out, under 18 years of age and have Restricted Mode enabled.

Moreover, you can easily download some age-restricted videos from YouTube with 4K Video Downloader app. Videos that don’t appear on your page because of Restricted Mode cannot be saved on your computer because, well, you can’t even see them.

How to enable Restricted Mode?

You can set up Restricted Mode on YouTube from any of your devices. All you need to do is to log in into your account. At first, let’s consider the way of activating the setting from your mobile.

Open your YouTube mobile app, then head over to your account icon at the top right corner. You’ll see the ways of the account management on your screen. Press Settings -> Restricted Mode and enable the mode.

Here you have it: Restricted Mode is activated.

Now let’s enable the mode in the browser.

To do this, open youtube.com in any of preferable browsers and find the account icon like you did it on your smartphone. Press on this, and open Restricted Mode: Off.

Then activate it.

Note that once you’ve enabled the Restricted Mode, it will be active only on the device or browser you’ve set this up.

To disable the Restricted Mode, do the same course of actions.

If you want to make sure Restriction Mode will not be turned off by your kids or minors, you can also lock it. To do so, go to your account again, scroll down to the Restricted Mode: On, press on it, and tap Lock Restricted Mode on this browser.

After this, you’ll be redirected to the page for verifying that it’s your account and enter your password.

Worth mentioning is that if the account doesn’t belong to you, you won’t be able to activate Restricted Mode. For instance, this feature is widely-used at schools, libraries, and institutions where only administrators have access to setting up the mode.

If Restriction Mode lock is no longer a necessity for you, you can easily unlock it following the same way of proceeding.

In conclusion

As you understand, Restriction Mode is a rather smart feature that allows providing a limited viewer experience and is useful for parents who want to control the content their children consume. But as we’ve said above and based on YouTube’s official claims, the algorithm is not always accurate.

Though the feature does its job and filters out the content that can be potentially harmful to certain audiences. If you haven’t had a clue about this function by far and have been looking for something like this, you should definitely try this out.