November 19, 2009

• The Hypocrisy of Youtube

  The other day I got this strange urge to torture myself.  My chosen arbitrary and completely undeserved punishment was randomly perusing the comments on certain popular youtube videos.

  Here’s one thread of comments I read:

  “you’re an idiot. Not like he’s doing this to get famous, this is blogging. Just saying your thoughts to the internet because I completely agree with the fame point he made. Fuck I only have 5000 subs and I already feel like I have no privacy. Why in the world would you want to be famous?”

  “was i asking u, faggot? even blogging causes some recognition for urself, and no one gives a shit if u hav 5000 subs, or if u hav no privacy. no one asked u anythin, dumbass”

  “if you don’t want someone to reply, don’t post a comment on youtube. Yes you were asking anyone who read your comment, which was very stupid, so fuck off faggot “

  “i was asking someone, but not u, u dumb SOB. u were the dumb cocksucker that started this, so y don;t u fuck off, bitch. go suck on ur mom’s cunt”

  “lol, wow you’re clever. You’ve mastered the language of swearing at only 14 years old. Grow up kid and learn how to argue”

  “oh, go shoot urself, fucking terrorist”

  I’m not one to generally feel offended by profanity. People can say whatever they want and I think it’s really important to defend the rights of people to speak as they choose even if some find their words offensive.

  However, youtube comments are just ridiculously absurd. They are pretty much universally reviled throughout the internet as amongst the most unintelligent, childish, and petty forums you can get. Jokes about the ridiculousness of youtube comment conversations were rampant three years ago.  I thought they would have surely improved since then. Judging by the discussion I posted above, apparently they have not.

  Youtube doesn’t seem to care either. The only real mechanism youtube ever created for moderating comments were the thumbs up/thumbs down buttons that almost nobody uses.Indeed when I looked at the comments I listed above only a couple had just a single -1 marking. I rarely see comments modded up.

  Contrast that to how youtube treats its videos. It takes only the slightest bit of profanity, violence, perceived nudity, or anything perceived as “indecent” to cause youtube to moderate a video so that it needs you to verify your age in order to view it. I see many video creators going out of their way to cut and edit videos to avoid even the slight chance of someone reporting their video. And yes it’s based on user reports. And there appear to be a large group of users who exert an enormous amount of effort seeking out and reporting videos they consider “inappropriate”.

  Indeed youtube has been known ban users and take all their videos offline rather rapidly if they perceive any kind of abuse. The excuse is that the user broke the terms of service. But that could be anything from posting one video that was considered overly sexually explicit or to a user whose posted hundreds of videos that directly violate another person’s copyright.

  Again though, youtube responds primarily to complaints and inevitably caves without even giving the user an opportunity to defend themselves. Hence, all viacomm videos were removed in response to the company’s suit no matter how much a video was edited or altered to be a derivative work.  You couldn’t make a fair use argument. Your case wouldn’t go to trial. Your video would simply be removed no questions asked. And your account might be banned in the process.

  For another example, recently there was a youtube video poster who posted many clips from television news media outlets to highlight their hypocrisy. A great many of those clips were from Fox News showing some host or another saying or doing something stupid.  Many many bloggers across the internet used this poster’s videos in their posts to highlight Fox News’s incompetence and absurdity. Fox News complained about their videos copyright being violated. Immediately the user’s account was taken down. 

  Now you might say, yeah but he WAS violating copyright. But here’s the thing. Unlike with Viacomm this was not a universal removal of all their videos from the site for copyright violation. No, many many users who post videos of Fox News programs to promote conservative principles remained online. Fox News didn’t complain about them even though they were just as much instances of copyright violation. Rather Fox News complained about the user that made them LOOK bad so that user was forced to lose their videos.

  Am I the only one that finds it ironic that youtube has become so obsessive in policing its videos and yet lets comments run so wild? It’s a weird double standard. Kids don’t get exposed to people cursing in videos, but if they scroll down and read comments they get exposed to all kinds of unregulated filth.

  But that’s just the way youtube works. When it comes to policing their video content they bend over backwards to accommodate any complaint, but when it comes to their comments they clearly couldn’t care less.

  • 5:16 pm
  • 6 Comments