April 1, 2008
Google admits YouTube rape video was 'a mistake'
Google today resisted calls to screen videos before they appeared on YouTube, despite admitting it had been too slow to take down a clip which showed a 25-year-old mother being gang-raped. Times Online reports.
"The search giant was attacked by MPs after admitting it was "clearly a mistake" that a video showing the woman being raped was watched 600 times before being removed from YouTube, the video-sharing site it owns.
Giving evidence before a Commons select committee, Google's general counsel, Kent Walker, said it would go against the spirit of the internet to require all videos to be screened and resisted calls for tighter regulation of sites like YouTube.
"Of the offensive videos that were flagged to the site, more than 50 per cent were removed within half an hour. A large majority is removed within an hour," he said.
... Mr Walker said, however, that it would be "neither efficient not effective" for YouTube to screen the entirety of the content uploaded by its users - about 10 hours of footage every minute - before it was made public.
"That would burden the process of creativity," he said. "You do not have a policeman on every street corner to stop things from happening, you have policemen responding very quickly when things do happen."
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