Why does youtube/chrome randomly resume play on paused video?

I have observed for a while now that if I leave a youtube page with a paused video, sometimes that video will randomly unpause by itself over a certain length of time (in the order of a few hours).

Why does youtube (on chrome) do this? And is there a way to prevent the video from unpausing randomly?

I have observed this mainly with the ABC News webpage at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIYb-7HxDSI

I've found one solution :')

For me it was my headphones jack triggering playback – it was misreading my headphone jack input and playing videos, even in the background – so, on Chrome, I've disabled media key input:

Type in chrome://flags.

Find 'Hardware Media Key Handling' and disable it.

This was on a Windows PC.

This happens to me when Windows is signed out and the screen is dark. It's happened a few times, usually in the middle of the night. The last time it happened, my headphones had broken a few days before so no headphones were connected.