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UP THE TUBE BY SIMON HARDING
M
ore than a billion viewers are streaming 5 billion videos every day. “What’s your role in watching it safely?” asks Simon Harding. My father used to refer to the television as ‘the idiot box’. As far as he was concerned, the less of it I watched, the better. He gave it that name because, in his view, children just sat, fixated to the screen with their mouths open, for hours on end, when they could have been doing something constructive. Therefore, there was never a video recorder in our house! Admittedly, that was in the early 80’s, but I can’t help wondering what he would have thought of YouTube. Today, just thirteen years after it was founded, more than a billion
people across the world tune in to YouTube each day. It is now the third most visited site on the internet – after Google and Facebook – and the second largest search engine. Children are watching in huge numbers. A 2017 report by Ofcom, the regulator for the UK’s communications industry, claims that 81% of children aged 8 to 11 use YouTube, with that number increasing to 90% between the ages of 12 and 15. According to the Australian Institute of Family Studies, by the age of 13, children spend, on average, up to 30% of their time awake, looking at screens. Data on the amount of time children spend on YouTube is hard to come by, but Neilsen’s digital content
81% OF CHILDREN AGED 8 TO 11 USE YOUTUBE
ratings report in June last year indicated that young Australian adults spent on average 32 hours on YouTube a month. The Ofcom report tells us that both the age groups above reported spending just under 50% of their time on YouTube watching music and funny videos, or pranks. Indeed, the music industry has really found a home on YouTube. There is a dearth of official statistics, but any Google search will show you that more than 90% of the most watched clips on YouTube are music videos. However, YouTube isn’t just about music videos. The content is user-generated and anyone who wants to, can create their own channel. YouTube likens using its service to joining a community of people from all over the world, and has established what it calls common-sense rules to prevent videos that include sexual, harmful, hateful, or violent content. But these rules are difficult
to police; every minute, somewhere between three and four hundred hours of video are uploaded to the service. So YouTube has to rely on a combination of algorithms and viewer reports to flag videos that need to be reviewed. And to its credit, it does take videos down. In the period October to December 2017, YouTube removed more than 8 million videos. It is also reports having 10,000 people currently working to address content that violates its terms of use. Some of the more difficult videos to police are referred to as YouTube ‘poop’. These are clips where original, copyright material has been altered in an attempt to amuse, annoy or shock. It is possible that children will stumble across – or even seek out – these clips and be presented with content that is most likely inappropriate, and perhaps even offensive and scary. To be fair to YouTube, it does say very specifically in
