Skip to main content
Industry Trends

YouTube Trying To Monitor Youth Violence

By October 31, 2008July 30th, 2023No Comments

With violence increasing at an alarming rate all over the world in general, and on YouTube in particular, YouTube has decided to do something about it – they are trying to detect and stop videos portraying youth crime being posted on the site.

In order to do this, however, they have requested their users to help out by flagging videos that they feel are inappropriate and violate the Community Guidelines laid down by YouTube.

To enable users to do this, YouTube has a system where users can flag a video and mark it as offensive due to a number of reasons that can be picked from a pull-down menu, which has various categories such as, “Harmful dangerous acts”, “Sexual Content”, “Spam” etc. Users can then mark the category under which a particular video falls, and YouTube will review it and take appropriate action.

Previously, one of the categories was titled “Minors Fighting”, but now, YouTube has changed the name to “Youth Violence” in the hope that this term will have a more serious connotation, and will be more noticeable to users. They feel that the flag, “Minors Fighting” was not being used enough, even though there are plenty of such videos posted online.

Once a user has flagged a video under this category, it will be YouTube’s responsibility to review the video and discontinue it if they feel it is necessary to do so.

The reason YouTube is asking for active audience participation in the censorship process, is because the subject is too vast for them to handle alone. It is estimated that about 13 hours of video are uploaded on this site every minute, thus making it a mammoth task to monitor, and hence they want their clients to act as a “first line of defense” and do their bit to help YouTube in keeping out inappropriate content.