Sometimes I just can’t figure out Google. A great company. Great people. But on some issues they’re just so incredibly, even dangerously “tone deaf” to serious risks that persist on their platforms.
You’ve probably already gotten tired of my discussions regarding the dangerous prank-dare-challenge videos on YouTube, e.g. “A YouTube Prank and Dare Category That’s Vast, Disgusting, and Potentially Deadly” – https://lauren.vortex.com/2017/12/17/youtube-prank-dare-vast-disgusting-potentially-deadly — and related posts.
So as if the dangerous “laxative prank” and Tide Pods Challenge and an array of other nightmarish YouTube-based efforts to achieve social media fame weren’t bad enough, we now are seeing a resurgence of the even more potentially disastrous “condom snorting” videos. If you haven’t heard of this one before, you probably shouldn’t investigate the topic shortly after eating.
The usual monsters of the Internet are already proclaiming this to be much ado about nothing, pointing out that it’s not a new phenomenon, even though it has suddenly achieved viral visibility again thanks mainly to YouTube. The usual sick statements like “let natural selection take its course” and “Darwin Award at work!” are also spewing from these child-hating trolls.
I wonder how many impressionable youths seduced into sickness or even death by these categories of videos would be viewed as too many by these sick minds? Five? Five hundred?
NO! One is too many!
Because by and large, these videos shouldn’t exist on YouTube at all.
But the trolls are right about one thing — many of these videos have been on YouTube for quite some time, gradually accumulating large numbers of views along the way. And when they suddenly “pop” and go viral, they’re like landmines that have finally exploded.
These videos clearly and absolutely violate Google’s YouTube Terms of Service by demonstrating unquestionably dangerous acts.
And they’re usually trivial to find via simple YouTube searches — often in vast quantities using obvious keywords. Since I can find them — since kids can find them — Google could certainly find them, if it really wanted to.
Google has made significant strides toward demonetizing or eliminating various forms of hate speech from YouTube. But for some reason, they seem to continue dragging their collective feet in the category of dangerous challenge, dare, and prank videos.
Google can fix this. Google MUST fix this. There simply aren’t valid excuses for this continuing, dangerous pestilence that is contaminating YouTube — one of my favorite sites on the Net — and in the process providing governments around the planet with more excuses to push knee-jerk censorship that will harm us all.
C’mon Google, please get your ass in gear, and get that crap off of YouTube.
No more excuses. Enough is enough.
–Lauren–