If you understood the subtitle reference, congratulations, you’re old enough to watch porn, and probably run for President. If you didn’t get it, you’re awfully young and let me explain something before we move on: My understanding is that there are dirty movies on the Internet; I am told dirty movies are also called “porn” and you can’t see them on TV or YouTube.
Mr. Owl
From what I hear it’s very, very easy to find everywhere else, so easy if you stumble across it once, it might chase you for the rest of your Web life and even torment you with stuff you’d rather not see and get you in trouble with your Mom or girlfriend if they come in the room at the wrong time when you’re being unfairly targeted by spammy type popup porno people. Hopefully, your girlfriend or Mom has also heard there are lots of dirty movies on the Internet made by dirty, rotten-souled people and they sometimes chase unsuspecting innocent Web browsers like you.
Not like me, obviously. I’ve just heard about stuff.
Yeah, okay, there was this one time, about ten months ago, I stumbled onto some stuff on YouTube, but I was obviously victimized. It was just there on the homepage under “Videos being watched right now.” Totally not my fault; it was a drive-by boobing.
When I talked to YouTube about it way back in October, they told me the community is usually better at policing these things and that they delete accounts of repeat-pornfenders. That sounded kind of silly at the time, because obviously I was the unlucky one millionth customer that day or something and was flashed three different kinds of dirtiness without even looking.
I even got screenshots.
But maybe it wasn’t so silly because I allotted myself ten minutes this afternoon to find some—out of strictly journalistic curiosity—and there wasn’t any. And ten whole minutes, from what I gather from some pervy friends (graphic designer types I work with), should be plenty of time to find some porn on the Internet.
Why did I decide to go back and check? I was reading this ReelPop blog post about a conversation between Mark Cuban and Google’s David Eun at the FCC hearing on Monday in Pittsburgh. Cuban was confused why Google couldn’t prevent copyrighted material from appearing on YouTube, but managed to keep pornographic material off the site.
I thought that was a weird thing to say because, like I said, less than a year ago it just sprang out all gnarly at me when I wasn’t even looking. (I wonder how often Cuban checks that? Sukebe, ne?) But then Eun assured him there was indeed porn ofnYouTube if you lurked around the recently uploaded video area and watched it before it got flagged.
I double-checked that last statement because it’s my job and stuff and after ten minutes the best worst I could find was a weird neon/reverse-image, sort of dirty, glowing silhouetted iPodish Atlanta strip club commercial—totally bikini’d, you could tell (there were strings where their earbuds should be).
There was tons of footage from the ESPY awards, and Miley Cyrus’s new video, the new Watchmen movie trailer, and like a million Dark Knight clips. But no porn to be found. Maybe the spokesperson I talked to last October was right: the community is super vigilant about flagging offensive content.
Not so much on other stuff, though.
Viacom’s CEO thinks that’s the way Google and YouTube users like it, too.
