Flaws in YouTube gangster video vetting exposed
A Times investigation has exposed failures in the video-sharing website’s
monitoring system and prompted action to tighten security
By Marcus Leroux, Kaya Burgess and Fran Yeoman
Found at http://technology.timesonline.co.uk
September 18, 2008
 Clips
show how gangs are using the internet to intimidate rivals
YouTube, the world’s largest video-sharing website, this week removed over
two dozen videos glorifying gangs and gang violence which had been on its
website in some cases for over 18 months.
Following a Times investigation into harmful and inappropriate material on
Youtube, the website took down 30 film clips, most shot in grainy video showing
hooded youths brandishing illegal weapons such as machetes, hand guns and even
sub-machine guns. Google admitted they were clearly in breach of its own user
guidelines which had recently been revised to deal with gang videos.
Google’s Head of Communications in Britain, former Newsnight editor Peter
Barron, said that as a result of concern about the use of the website by gangs,
it had now introduced new guidelines prohibiting users from showing weapons in
their videos in order to intimidate people, but that these had only “gone
live” on Friday.
He blamed “teething problems” with the new policy for the fact that its
own monitors had failed to removed the material after a Times reporter posing
as an ordinary user had flagged them up as inappropriate three days after the
new policy had been introduced.
 Clips
show how gangs are using the internet to intimidate rivals
“The new guidelines have just been established, clearly it will take a
little while for them to feed through the system,” said Mr Barron.
In recent years YouTube and other “networking” sites such as Bebo, have
become a battleground for warring gangs who post videos of themselves
brandishing weapons to intimidate their rivals. In many cases responses from
other gangs have been posted on the comments page warning the makers of the
video about what would happen should they stray onto their territory.
YouTube provides users with the option to “embed” their videos onto other
websites, which means that the same clips appear across other sites such as Bebo
and MySpace — or are posted direct.
YouTube claims it is not possible to vet material before it is uploaded to
the site because of the sheer volume — an estimated 13 hours of video is
uploaded every minute and hundreds of thousands of new films are posted on the
site every day.
Instead it relies on a policy of self-regulation whereby users can “flag”
material they consider inappropriate. Some critics have likened the system to
asking drunks to decide on licensing laws.
Flagged content is then reviewed by staff who decide whether to remove it
from the site. According to YouTube the “vast majority” of flagged material
is reviewed, and if necesary removed, within half an hour.
Yet of 30 videos The Times flagged between 1pm on Monday and 11.15am on
Tuesday, only three had been removed by Google before it was contacted by our
reporter at 4pm on Tuesday. Google said that it no record of another three being
flagged but agreed they breached its guidelines and took them down. Ten of the
videos had been flagged by The Times a month earlier but had not been removed.
One video, titled “Welcome to Liverpool” in which youths are shown riding
motorbikes and brandishing weapons, had been on the site since June 14, 2007 and
had been viewed over 145,000 times before it was removed after the intervention
of the Times.
Mr Barron said the videos would not have been removed before Friday because
there was nothing in YouTube’s rules barring the posting of gang videos.
“There used to be a set of guidelines for material that was unacceptable,
that was hate speech, pornography and violence or threats against a particular
person. What we realised was that the type of videos that cause so much concern
in Britain wasn’t caught under those guidelines so, as a result of listening
to people’s concerns, we’ve decided to include brandishing of weapons and
non specific threatening behaviour. We’re in a new era now where that kind of
video is classed as unacceptable and will be removed in future.”
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith tonight welcomed YouTube’s change of policy.
"I am extremely pleased that YouTube have today taken action to ban
videos glamorising weapons. This is a real step forward. I would like to see
other internet service providers follow suit to reinforce our message that
violence will not be tolerated either on the internet or in the real world.”
According to research by Nielsen Online, YouTube is the fourth most popular
website among British children, visited by 590,000 two to 11-year-olds every
month and a further one million children aged 12 to 17. Earlier this year it was
heavily criticised when it emerged that a video of a woman allegedly being
gang-raped was viewed 600 times before YouTube removed it. It was also revealed
the video had been flagged once already.
Concerns about the way sites such as YouTube deal with such material were
raised by the House of Commons Culture Media and Sport Select Committee which published
a report on harmful material on the internet and in video games in July.
According to the report, one in six children between eight and 15 have viewed
“nasty, worrying and frightening” content on the internet. It expressed
concern that material on sites such as YouTube do not carry any age
classification “nor is there a watershed before which it cannot be viewed.”
In some cases rather than remove a video, YouTube classifies it as “inappropriate
for some users” in which case anyone wanting to view it is required to verify
they are 18 or over by signing in or registering on the site. Anyone who’s
user profile indicates they are under 18 is then blocked from viewing it.
However, there is nothing to stop users lying about their age or to prevent
under-18s from creating a new user profile with a different date of birth.
The select committee’s Chairman, John Whittingdale MP, said YouTube’s
system for dealing with harmful and inappropriate material was generally
effective but he was not convinced it could not be doing more. He said Google
had told his committee it was going to “tighten procedures for removing
inappropriate material.... Clearly from the evidence you have gathered they
still have a long way to go.”
Communications regulator Ofcom has also criticised YouTube’s review process
as “opaque” adding that “because it is impossible to determine what
proportion of content is potentially harmful, there is no means to assess the
overall effectiveness of the system”. It called on the industry to draw up a
code of practice requiring sites such as YouTube to increase the transparency of
their review processes “for example by reporting on times for dealing with ‘flags’.”
When The Times asked Google’s Peter Barron how many people YouTube has
monitoring inappropriate material and how much material it removes every day, he
said it was the company’s policy not to give such figures but that it
represented a “tiny tiny proportion” of the total content. He denied the
company’s refusal to provide figures meant there was no way of judging how
effective YouTube’s system of self-regulation is.
"We can be judged on the kind of exercise you have undertaken,” he
said. “ You got us on the cusp of a change in policy, you'll have to look
again in a few weeks time [to judge if it's working]."
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