Moral Panic 2.0
A committee of MPs has set out to start a moral panic over sites such as YouTube and Flickr that allow users to upload their own content.
A Culture, Media and Sport select committee believes a new industry body - likely to be known as the child internet safety council - should be set up to monitor the internet and attempt to protect children from “harmful content”.
More controversially – and less realistically – the committee also said it should be “standard practice” for sites hosting user-generated content to review material proactively.
This would mean that every one of the hundreds of thousands of videos, pictures and even blog comments and forum posts put up on UK sites on a daily basis would have to be checked before publication, rather than the current passive system where only videos that attract complaints are monitored.
The committee acknowledged that the volume of content on sites such as YouTube - which has 10 hours of videos uploaded every minute - made it unrealistic to watch every video before it went online.
But Something Must Be Done!
The committee stopped short of demanding mandatory regulation, but does “expect providers of all Internet services based upon user participation to move towards these standards without delay.”
Friday 01 Aug 2008 | Paul | UK
