I have read a lot of horror stories about sites like YouTube and other video sharing sites, with users uploading video of their crimes. I went looking for some information on how one would actually stop these videos and personally didn’t find much, about all I found was the “Report inappropriate” option. I assume that given the types of videos that can be put on YouTube, the definition of “Inappropriate” might be a little hard to set, and the possibility of many false positives would be high.
I have started a small group of volunteers. These volunteers cycle through a database of the latest videos posted on YouTube, watching each one after another. As they view videos they have the option to chat and share videos they find entertaining. There are various flags that can be set for each video, and the option to enter a user specified comment. Flags do not need to be set for each video, and should only be set when the situation calls for it, however flags are both positive and negative. Positive flags include videos that are educational, funny, and family friendly. These videos will in time be posted as a list to our main site, particularly for those that want a family friendly YouTube playlist.
As for Illegal videos, if a video is watched that demonstrates someone committing a criminal act, that video will be flagged as illegal. From there a moderator or admin will take a look at it to determine it’s status. If the video is deemed to be illegal by a moderator it will be elevated to the next available admin unless the video obviously needs to be forwarded to authorities immediately.
I still have to check the legalities on this, but I think that videos flagged as illegal should be temporarily cached until authorities can determine what they would like to do. Of course I believe this would be done by YouTube so it might not be necessary.
Anyways, It’s really late (5:30AM) and I’m really tired, I just wanted to get this off before I hit the hay. If anyone is interested, if anyone can lend help in any way, through testing or whatever. If you’re a web developer I’d really love to pick your brain. Just leave me a comment I’d love to hear from you.
I bet you $50 this post doesn’t make much sense, or it’s hard to read, but it’s all blurry now and I can’t fix it. So… Sorry :/
This is a terrific idea Distatica. Do you have a link to your youtube group?
Thank you for your reply Hazel. I fought my girlfriend long and hard on this one, and I think that I must agree with her opinion; this idea (while well intentioned) could only have a limited reach, the chances of getting many people to continuously watch / rate videos, with the small chance that we actually find something out of so many new videos, is rather slim.
However I still strongly believe that some kind of group is needed with the goal of gaining credibility with sites like YouTube and Google video, so these videos can be reported immediately, without these sites having to go through each “Report as inappropriate” flagged video, for this to be done some type of criteria must be established to determine what is actually a video that should be flagged, and this criteria must be met to avoid wasting our time, the sites time, and possibly the time of any authorities involved.
A group like this may be able to do some research first, to help everyone along, as I believe we would all (group, society, and the site) want to have these videos removed as quickly as possible.
Hazel, I will be contacting you privately by email to ask for your insight and any possible suggestions for such a group.
I would not personally like to be in any sort of leadership or spokesperson role, as I am currently young and stupid, but can commit a good deal of energy to the development of a site, my input on any documents that must be written, etc.
Because of this, I am currently looking for a responsible person who is interested in heading up such a group, while I offer web development, hosting, and anything else I can scrounge up.
Sincerely,
distatica.