YouTube’s new policy regarding Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) has thrown creators into a morass. Starting in January 2020, if creators mark a video as directed at kids, data collection will be blocked for all viewers, resulting in lower ad revenue, and those videos will lose some of the platform’s most popular features, including comments and end screens, according to The Verge. Meanwhile, comics-hosting site SmackJeeves made drastic alterations including removing the forums, removing private messaging, removing custom site designs, replacing “fans” with “support” (which are kind of like ‘likes,’ I think?) and starting their own app and currency system. And it was only two years ago that Tapastic unilaterally granted itself the right of first refusal in the intellectual property of creators using their platform. All of these actions have resulted in an outcry from creators whose expectations for those platforms had been shattered.

What can we as creators do about this?

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