YouTube’s Ethics – Doesn’t Want To Monitor Videos
Posted on | November 26, 2007 | No Comments
Well, I was doing my normal day-to-day web surfing and ended up on interesting site saying that “YouTube rejects calls to monitor videos.” Something interesting I didn’t know was that Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the guy who planned a school shooting in Finland, “used YouTube to publicise his plans to attack his high school in Tuusula, hours before he killed eight people then shot himself.” WOW. Had they caught onto this earlier there could’ve been 1 guy in rehab and 8 people with their lives. Now, YouTube’s response was that they didn’t want to “become the censors of the web.” OK–I absolutely understand… but this video was put up hours before the shooting and we know the YouTube sometimes screens videos that are mature/sexual. Let’s just say they did see the video… did they move on and forget about it? Would they have been able to prevent the attack if they warned local Finnish police? I’m not sure I can sit here and give you any answers that would even have a 50% chance of being true, but this is really disappointing.
YouTube says:
“If it were child pornography then we would inform the authorities immediately. In the case of somebody doing a video that looks something like hate speech, however, we would remove the account. In most of these cases we don’t report it.”
YouTube users can flag up anything of concern, particularly pornography, bullying and violence. Moderators then decide whether the material breaks YouTube’s rules and often remove offending video in minutes.
If they can remove videos in minutes, I’m sure a video that was up for hours could’ve been reported had it been deemed a harm to someone elses life. This raises questions about morals and ethics. Would YouTube be ethically wrong not to notify anyone if someone posts up a video saying they will be killing someone in a couple hours? Should they? Who’s to judge? I think we will definitely be hearing more about this in the future. Since everyone is posting up videos on YouTube, who knows what will happen in future videos if (and hopefully it doesn’t) something like this occurs again.
Original Article At: The Guardian
Tags: ethics > finland shooting > morals > Pekka-Eric Auvinen > school shooting > you tube > youtube
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