1. “YouTube has no ethics, it's been created for the sole purpose of entertainment and money.” Do you agree?



As much as I love YouTube, I have to sadly admit that Youtube has no ethics, it’s been created for the sole purpose of entertainment and money. Youtube is a popular video sharing website that allows users to upload videos, view videos and share videos. Not only so, it still allows users to comment on the videos, to give ratings on the video. YouTube is also extremely user-friendly and has a wide variety of genres of videos, ranging from Japanese anime to self-directed videos. Furthermore, YouTube has absolutely no restrictions on the video content that is being uploaded by its users unless another viewer has viewed the content and flagged it as inappropriate then will YouTube interfere and ban the user.

Due to the wide variety of videos being uploaded on YouTube, it has attracted quite a number of netizens especially teenagers who spend most of their leisure time on the computer. As the restrictions are pretty liberal, these teenagers can be exposed to inappropriate content like extreme violence, pornography. This is causing an increase in the number of juvenile crimes and juvenile delinquents as the wrong values are being taught here. In this case here, shouldn’t YouTube screen what the users upload before actually allowing millions of teenagers all over the world to view it to prevent underage people to view such content? But no, YouTube only takes action when other users have flagged the video as inappropriate content. That is probably only after a period of time and I wonder how many teenagers have viewed that particular video. It is not a small matter as it can lead to social problems like pornography addiction, which can affect a teenager pretty badly and might even be a problem till his or her adult life. The effects can be damaging.

Besides this issue, another is the infringement on copyright. YouTube is currently facing a civil lawsuit against them by Viacom for unauthorized video clips. They have demanded $1 billion copyright lawsuit. “Before that they demanded that YouTube remove more than 100,000 unauthorized clips from its website, and since that time the company has uncovered more than 50,000 additional unauthorized clips.” (http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070313/viacom_youtube_lawsuit.html?.v=19). It seems as though YouTube does not care about its surroundings. An infringement of copyright can cost the jobs of many whereby people no longer purchase television shows to watch and instead just catch it a few days later.

However, YouTube is not all that bad either whereby some videos are of good use. For example, there is this whole range of self directed videos about this father taking care of his autistic son and it shows people about how autistic children are and how to take care of them.

It is obvious now that YouTube is created for the sole entertainment and money as they would have taken more precautions to prevent explicit content videos to be uploaded. But instead, they would only take action after other users has flagged it as inappropriate.