Andy’s Blog

You Tube is seen by many as the best website on the internet. It provides people with a platform to show there film creating talents to the world. Spend a few minutes browsing around and you can find videos of a “Talking Cat” or someone’s sporting accomplishments captured on film for the world to see.

As highlited in a recent BBC Panorama Programme entitled “Children’s Fight Club” there is also a  growing trend of people adding very disturbing video’s to Youtube.

Whilst browsing around youtube its not long before you stumble across Video’s showing school children being bullied and psyically assulted by their own class mates. The attackers then place these videos on the internet for the world to see.Not only does the victim have to suffer the physical attacks but then they have the face the fact that the videos taken by their attackers will be on the internet, where they or their family and friends may see them.

Who’s responsibility is it to remove these videos?

YouTube’s Spokesperson Rachel Whetstone Says that it is the responsibility of the user community to decide wether these types of videos are innapropriate.

To me that sounds like passing the book, if I was to host similar videos on this blog then that would be my responsibility and you could almost gaurantee that I would be before a judge explaining my actions pretty quickly.

So how do Youtube and site similar get away with it? Surely there are laws preventing the distribution of video depicting criminal acts.

 Will Youtube moderate the content uploaded to their site, probably not, it would take a lot of people and money to police such a vast quantity of content. But then again the Parent company Google surely could afford this and I am sure that the ammount of money the site is making from advertising would more than cover the cost.

I personally feel that sites like these have a moral if not legal obligation to ensure that these videos are deleted, but until then I guess it is down to the Community to Mark the videos as innapropriate, that or find an alternative site for sharing videos.

Jessica Luthi CEO AffiliateProgramAdvice.com has compiled a very well written open letter to Youtube regarding this matter.

The Panorama Show is here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_6920000/newsid_6923900/6923914.stm?bw=bb&mp=rm&news=1

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/6921555.stm