Filtering Facts.org

Parents Television Council has just released a study of YouTube’s filtering: 

PTC Analysis of YouTube Finds Explicit Content is One Click Away from Children
Popular Child-Friendly Terms Like “Hannah Montana” Give Kids Easy Access to Sexual Content and Explicit Language 

LOS ANGELES (December 17, 2008) – In its first analysis of online media, the Parents Television Council^TM found that extremely graphic content and harsh profanity are just a click away for kids entering seemingly innocent search terms on YouTube, the most popular destination for online video that has undertaken several policies to control inappropriate content. The PTC’s latest study, The “New” Tube, not only analyzes content in 280 of the most popular YouTube videos between March and October 2008 according to Compete Data Hub, but also takes into account the text commentary and advertisements that were available alongside the videos. 

The 20 highest-ranked YouTube videos from each of the site’s most popular search terms yielded an extraordinary amount of graphic and adult-themed content.

For example, 98 percent of the videos analyzed under the popular search term “Lil Wayne” did not require any form of age verification, despite containing high levels of explicit adult content. In fact, 50 percent of the videos that were associated with the rapper featured verbalized non-muted expletives, including the s-word, b-word, several variations of the f-word, and explicit references to human anatomy. Twenty-eight percent of the videos resulting from the search term “porn” did not require any form of age verification.

 I ran a search in YouTube of a common term that might be used by both innocent minors and pornsurfers, “Teen Girls.”  The first search I ran was without the YouTube filtering.   The results instantly brought up a screen full of graphic pornography results, along with search suggestions for ” teen girls having sex,” “nude teen girls,” etc.  

When I clicked on the explicit links, I got YouTube’s gateway message, “To view this video or group, please verify you are 18 or older by signing in or signing up.”  This is helpful, but it doesn’t prevent a minor who wants to access to content from signing up and claiming to be over 18, of course.

I next enabled the YouTube filtering option, which is extremely simple to enable: 

I next ran the same search again, but the results weren’t impressive – I got almost the same number of explicit links.  The filtered suggested sites also suggests more pornography terms, such as “fingering.”

What’s really noteworthy here is that these video clips are already tagged by YouTube as adult content – but YouTube’s filter doesn’t catch them!  The left-handed content filter doesn’t know what the right-handed rating is doing.

Google’s other filtering is quite good.  I did the same search “Teen Girls” on two other Google programs – Google text search and Google image search, both using “strict filtering”  and got zero porn links in the first 100 listing of the text search and zero porn images in the first 100 images displayed.  That’s right – zero.  So Google’s got some work to do to bring its YouTube filtering up to the high standards it has for its other products.