British MPs go for the YouTube jugular

newsguy 0 Tallied Votes 158 Views Share

According to The Telegraph newspaper here in the UK, British Members of Parliament are kicking up a right old stink about YouTube. Specifically regarding what it does, or more to the point what it does not do, to prevent sexually explicit and violent video clips from being posted.

The House of Commons "Culture and Media Committee" says that it is completely unimpressed with the systems that YouTube has in place to filter out sexual and violent content. Surely, the point is that there is no active filtering to prevent the publication of such material. Instead, YouTube relies upon user intervention to report 'bad' videos which can then be removed as soon as their inappropriate nature has been confirmed by YouTube staff.

The MPs are dismissive of the YouTube argument that there are too many video posted to pre-approve them for publication. Even though YouTube says there are some 10 hours of video posted every minute, the MPs say that pre-publication filtering should be the norm for all user generated content.

The Culture and Media Committee answer is to propose policing standards set by a self-regulating body within the user generated content industry online.