by Kenny
Crane 01/09/08
YouTube is a great site for watching all kinds of videos. You can find everything
from family vacation videos to music videos from the 1960s to clips of Japanese Anime.
People email each other links to YouTube videos about funny cats, laughing babies,
dancing motivational speakers and young people lip-syncing to popular songs. YouTube
is all the rage among children of all ages. They want to see the popular viral videos
that their friends are watching and talking about. YouTube can be a great source of
entertainment for the whole family. But it can also shock and upset tender minds if
they see or read things that are not appropriate for their age.
Parents have already been warned about the dangers of letting their younger children
access the internet unattended. They know that they have to make sure their children
are not talking to strangers and they tell their kids never to give out personal information.
Many parents have software that blocks their children from certain sites or only allows
them to access certain sites. Parents need to know what is on a site to determine
if they will allow their children to visit it. You may have visited YouTube yourself,
laughing at a funny clip or maybe learning about a candidate in the upcoming election.
But beware, YouTube has a dark side. There are many videos on YouTube that are not
for children!
YouTube is full of Sex videos. You may have heard that YouTube does not allow pornographic
clips on its site. It is true that they say in their Terms of Use that videos of that
kind are not allowed. However, there is no way to tell if a video is porn until someone
watches it; they can't be automatically screened out by YouTube's computers. In the
early days of YouTube, uploaded porn videos would last several days until someone
flagged the video and YouTube removed it. Now, porn vids with nudity are caught almost
immediately. People still try to upload them, but YouTube is much better at removing
the videos and banning the people who keep coming back with different names.
Porn videos with nudity are very rare on YouTube. However, many other types of sex
videos are freely available. Among the most viewed are the so-called Booty Shaking
clips. They consist of young girls suggestively dancing, shaking their bodies, often
clad in only bras and thongs. One video shows two possibly underage girls (you don't
see their faces) thrusting their thong wearing butts and making sexual gestures. Each
girl lowers her thong twice, enough to briefly expose her private parts. This video
has been on YouTube for over a month and has been viewed thousands of times. Would
you want your grade school age children to see this? Would you want your teenaged
daughters to see this and think that everyone is doing it so it must be acceptable
behavior?
You may wonder if it's easy to find videos like this. YouTube has a search mechanism.
You can enter keywords that people have used to describe their videos and all matches
are shown. Some people use every kind of sexual word they can think of to draw people
to their videos, even when the videos are harmless. But it is easy to find sexual
videos with booty shaking and worse. Enter "jailbait" and you'll get 285 videos. One
says in its description, "Jailbait - sometimes it's worth it." Search on "underage"
and you'll get 1030 videos. Type in other more direct terms that you might expect
to result in sexual videos and you'll get far more search results.
YouTube has a Flag mechanism that allows any user to flag a video for content. Then,
YouTube will view the video and mark it as not for minors or remove it. If a video
is marked as not for minors, all that happens is a button appears that asks the viewer
to state that they are old enough to watch the video. Click the button and the video
plays!
What other kinds of Sex videos are on YouTube? There are many videos that advertise
webcam girl sites. The video stops just as the girl is about to expose herself. The
viewer gets a free sample of the merchandise and is encouraged to visit the sex site
for more. All kinds of sex sites use YouTube to advertise their wares. There are also
all kinds of fetish videos - especially foot fetish and smoking fetish vids. Also,
there are shoe, excrement, cross-dress, latex and balloons fetish clips - 76,100 search
results for "fetish." There is one particularly disturbing video that is too graphic
for YouTube; but people are filming and uploading their reaction to watching this
video from another site. It goes by the name "2 G**** 1 C**" (it's too disturbing
to watch so I purposely censored the title). If your young child sees this video,
they may very well throw up and have a bad psychological reaction. Almost everyone
who has uploaded a "reaction" video to YouTube nearly upchucks and says how disgusting
it is.
There are no porn videos with nudity on YouTube, but there are many videos with nudity.
There are several very informative videos about how to do breast examinations. This
is a real service to grown women but you can tell from the comments on these videos
that males are watching them for sexual gratification. One frequently viewed video
shows a UK college girl's sports team stripping from the waist up in order to examine
their breasts. There are also breast surgery videos that show before and after pics.
You can also find extremely explicit videos of actual gynecological examinations.
Do you want your young children to see that?
It might be wise to block young children from YouTube, or at least sit with them if
you allow them on the site. But even if they go to videos that you would expect to
be appropriate for their age - Disney clips, music videos, funny animals and laughing
babies - you have to be aware of two more things. YouTube now puts ads in some videos,
so you will be exposed to commercial messages in yet another medium. Also, people
are free to write whatever they want in the video's comments area. People write some
extremely rude and upsetting things in the comments! There are several cases of young
ladies who have left the site due to rude and nasty comments on their videos, including
descriptions of sexual acts people say they would like to perform with these ladies.
YouTube does not screen for language or content in the comments, so expect to occasionally
see rude, crude and shocking writings even in the most innocent videos' comment areas.
YouTube is only one of many video sharing sites. Some do allow porn, or are not at
all diligent about removing them when they are uploaded. Some sites freely show hardcore
sex acts, scenes from porn movies, women tied up and underage naked girls. Of course,
there are many porn sites that require a monthly fee for access. But others charge
no fee and are similar in look and feel to YouTube; people can upload whatever they
want to these sites. Often, these sites will try to download possibly harmful programs
to your computer. One site looks just like YouTube but if you click on a video to
play it, something will be downloaded to your computer. A pop-up will ask if you want
to download it. If you try to X out of that, it will keep coming back. The only way
out is to bring up the Task Manager, highlight the Windows Internet Explorer (or whatever
browser you use) on the Applications tab, then click End Task.
If you want to prevent children in your house from watching sex videos online, the
best thing to do on computers that kids can access is set security to High so that
no ActiveX controls can be run. This also prevents videos from displaying. If your
child wants to watch a video online, please consider sitting right there with them,
and be prepared to turn off the power button on your computer monitor if something
inappropriate comes on!
Kenny Crane has been writing about YouTube
videomakers and their videos at YouTubeStars.com since
June 2006. He also publishes the YouTube
Top 100 Weekly Chart of the Most Popular YouTube videomakers.
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