Today was officially designated “porn day” by the followers of eBaum’s World, an organized group of users who uploaded explicit videos to the website — a practice which is forbidden under YouTube policy (no nudity).
While YouTube was quick to react to the onslaught, for the next couple of days users may come across thumbnails of videos, which are not active, and yet remain in the search cache.
YouTube began taking down the videos immediately after midnight on Wednesday, when the onslaught began. Early posters were using readily identifiable tags, which helped YouTube remove the videos early on. However, throughout the course of the day the eBaum’s World crew began changing tactics. Videos would appear with 20 to 30 seconds of an innocuous clip, such as news footage from a local TV station, only to then begin with the pornography section.
Google spokesman, Scot Rubin, told Ars Technica:
It may take some time for video search results and thumbnail images to disappear from the site. Typically, this should not take more than a couple of days, but the videos themselves are no longer viewable.
See Ars Technica
Rick’s Opinion
YouTube has developed technology which lets the system automatically scan through audio tracks to determine which videos contain copyrighted music. In addition, Google has incorporated logic into their Google Map Street View service, which is designed to blur out faces and license plates that happened to be captured during the street view filming.
I’m wondering why YouTube could not construct some algorithms which would analyze images when they are uploaded (and converted from the upload format) in real-time to determine if there is questionable content. If so, then it could be either flagged for inspection or denied upload at that time.
It seems like this may actually be a very practical use of video monitoring technology, something to enforce the site’s policy of no nudity.
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