British MPs blast YouTube and other video sites
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MPs in the United Kingdom have said that video sites such as YouTube and their content, can introduce vunerable children to the dark side of the internet. A video earlier in the year, showing gang sexual abuse of a woman, was viewed around six hundred times before it was removed from YouTube, and MPs say that they are unimpressed how little effort YouTube put into removing inappropriate videos.
This is a subject that I feel will be debated over time and time again. Some people are very aware of YouTube statistics, and it seems MPs agree that it is very difficult to monitor every video on the site, considering that 10 hours of footage is uploaded every single minute. There are some people which do not understand this, and although I agree that YouTube could give more effort into removing videos, it relies very much on the viewers and users which report inappropriate material, and the reported 45 terabytes of data and counting that YouTube holds is very hard to monitor.
The MPs have suggested software to automatically filter inappropriate material, yet how reliable would such a piece of software be and how exactly would it detect videos which purposfully are named and tagged differently to try and bypass such a system. They have said they would like to see age-classification for online games. Although YouTube has a policy where you are required to be 18 years or over to watch certain footage, anybody can register an account with a fake date of birth, and there is really no way which online games could be restricted, as under age users could simply lie about their age. What would MPs suggest we do with the hundreds of thousands of online games already live?
In short I believe while the MPs are correct that YouTube may want to spend more time removing inappropriate content, the sheer volume of that content is also relying on honest users reporting it as it is impossible for staff of YouTube to view every single video. What do you think? Are the MPs right? What do you suggest is the best way to overcome this problem? Should there be an classification system for online games? Leave a comment.
“Putting (the video) on the internet was an abomination,” the mother said at the time. “I was raped on film and you could hear my daughter and four-year-old son crying. I cannot understand how any website could show such a thing.”
3 Comments
Marcus Hamaker
July 31st, 2008
at 6:14am
I know that people don’t want to keep hearing this but I firmly believe that parents need to be more involved in their children’s use of the internet. I have a 4 year old son and I watch closely what he is doing when he is clicking around playing an online children’s game. We all know that from that game to adult content could happen in less than 5 clicks.
Granted Youtube should probably put more effort into their removal of indecent material, but that doesn’t mean that things might still not get through for a short period of time. The parents of these kids are the only ones who can stop it from happening EVERY time.
Rick
August 1st, 2008
at 11:56am
Sure, there’s a problem with an individual posting video footage of a criminal sexual assault, just as much as for posting footage of murders, beatings and beheadings, and other similarly grotesque crimes. Similarly disturbing is the fact that the objectionable video was viewed about 600 times before the footage was removed. But this is ancillary to the real problem.
More disturbing is the thought process that would justify censorship on the basis that there are unsupervised children searching the web who are likely to view the content in question. The primary responsibility of this issue is that of the parents who fail to properly educate, discipline and mentor their children in responsible activity. If a child watches a disturbing video, it is only because their adult parent or guardian has given them permission to do so. If the parent doesn’t properly police their kids, which is fully their responsibility, they ARE providing tacit approval for whatever activity that child is likely to participate in.
YouTube and other such sites are partly culpable in this matter, but don’t throw them under the bus for the failure of parents to perform their duties.
internetnut
August 1st, 2008
at 5:02pm
I believe both Marcus and Rick are correct in saying that parents must monitor their children’s usage of the internet. I will be adding a post shortly reviewing free powerful protection software with a link. Keep your kids safe.