YouTube Should Screen All Uploaded Videos, UK Group Says

In the view of an UK government agency, both social networking sites, and those that host user-generated content, should be required to do make more efforts to screen the content on their sites as to protect users, particularly children, from videos that may be regarded as harmful.

Today the House of Commons' Culture Media and Sport Committee put forward its tenth report - "Harmful content on the Internet and in video games," which tackle the issue of "the Internet’s dark side" and what measures are in place to make surfing on the Internet safer. The Committee believes that social media sites should put into practice stricter policies, focus more on the accurateness of content filtering, and also facilitate any abuse report.

According to the Committee the Internet can be seen as a place "where hardcore pornography and videos of fights, bullying or alleged rape can be found, as can websites promoting extreme diets, self-harm, and even suicide." This is the reason it's so necessary for websites such as MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube to be more firm and restrictive when it comes to offensive or unauthorized content. One of the complaints of the Committee is directed towards what appears to be an industry standard of 24 hours to take out material that contains child abuse, and makes a strong recommendation that such issues be treated with more dedication and gravity.

The agency also showed distress with regard to the fact that there's no filtering applied on the videos uploaded to YouTube (human or computer) before being posted to the site. In this respect Google pronounced that doing this would be nearly impossible because about 10 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute of the day.

However, the Committee showed determination: "To plead that the volume of traffic prevents screening of content is clearly not correct: indeed, major providers such as MySpace have not been deterred from reviewing material posted on their sites," says the report.

We will be following the matter and make further posts on its evolution.