In an effort to crack down on Youth Violence, YouTube is calling upon its community of users to help flag videos uploaded to the site that feature underage people doing violent things like fighting each other. Once a video is flagged, the YouTube team will review it and decide if removal is justified.
This is not a new process, but YouTube is calling attention to it as well as the fact that they have changed the “minors fighting” flag with “youth violence”. This is presumably to lend a more serious-sounding connotation to it to inspire more people to use the flag.
YouTube appears to be stressing the importance of community to an effort like this, almost as if it were a virtual neighborhood watch. A post from the YouTube Team on the official blog says:
Think of the Guidelines and the flagging pull-down menu as part of our ongoing conversation with you. We give you a structure that makes it easier for you to talk to us, and you become the eyes and ears of the site. Of course, the best conversations are never static, and the same is true about this one. We’re always reviewing our Guidelines and the flagging categories to make sure they reflect what you see on the site…
With 13 hours of video uploaded every minute, we need you to be our first line of defense against content that violates our Community Guidelines, and we’ll keep doing all we can to make doing your part clear and easy.
I was not aware that youth violence was such a problem for YouTube. Obviously it’s a problem in the real world, but I did not realize that YouTube was having so much trouble policing the site for it. Perhaps if I had been searching for “kids beating each other up” I would have known better.
I doubt that a large percentage of the YouTube community reads the YouTube blog, so even though they have called attention to the issue there, I wouldn’t expect a drastic increase in flagging of these videos. Still, the new flag label might encourage some to act.
