Date: Thursday, August 2, 2007
Online child fight videos causing outrage
A shocking plethora of violent child fight videos are appearing on video-sharing websites to the disgust of viewers.
Images of children as young as eleven and twelve attacking other children and causing them serious harm are being shown on websites such as YouTube and Liveleak, which has resulted in appeals for better policing of the content of these websites to be heard. However many of these websites have said it’s not their responsibility as private companies to censor the content their users post. They say that if users flag up posts that are offensive and are found to be in contravention of their rules they will only then remove the videos. Other websites have said that although they do check every post before it goes live, they will still allow these fight videos to be shown as they believe that if something is happening in real life they should show it on their site.
Police chiefs however have said that these companies are responsible for monitoring the content of their sites. They argue that these sites have much greater resources which enable them to supervise the content of the videos better than the police can. The Association of Chief Police Officers have said that reports of offensive content from their websites should then be passed on to higher officials. This seems to be a much needed measure if we are going to stop the shocking videos, such as those of a child kicking another in the head, and another of a child brandishing a handgun, from being shown online. However users of these sites have argued that the websites themselves are not responsible for policing the content of videos, but rather the users who are viewing them. What nearly everyone is agreed upon though is that these videos must stop being shown.
Source:
BBC News
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