Griefing

Having reread Julian Dibbell's 'Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses: Put the Blame on Griefers, the Sociopaths of the Virtual World' (in Wired in 2008, now in Steven Johnson [ed] The Best Technological Writing 2009 (Yale University Press, 2009)) and Burcu Bakioglu's less engaging 'Spectacular Interventions of Second Life: Goon Culture, Griefing, and Disruption in Virtual Spaces' in 1(3) Journal of Virtual Worlds Research (2009) 3-21 over lunch I am struck by a BBC item today reporting that YouTube has removed hundreds of explicit videos that were tagged with the names of teenage celebrities such as Hannah Montana and that commenced with images suitable for minors before featuring groups of adults engaged in various intimacies. The uploading, supposedly in response to restrictions on music copyright infringement, was claimed as demonstrating the ease with which adult content can be disseminated via YouTube.

The BBC claims that one user (or briefer) believed to have uploaded some of the videos is -

Flonty, whose profile states that he is 21 and from Germany.

He told the BBC: "I did it because YouTube keeps deleting music. It was part of a 4Chan raid."

4Chan [being a culture where] "Anything and everything can, and usually does, happen here. We have our very own unique culture, and there is no group quite like us anywhere out there".

When asked if he was concerned that children can freely watch such inappropriate material on YouTube, Flonty replied: "Children will find inappropriate material around the internet anyway.

"This kind of raid showed how easy it is to upload porn to a website that millions of people browse on a daily basis".

One response to that was

Flonty - you may have shown how easy it is to upload this material. It's also easy to hit people with a car, but that doesn't mean you do it. The anonymity of the internet helps cowards.

Another is

The problem is that the hackers intentionally tagged the videos under misleading names. So it seems to me that their intent was to get children to look at pornographic materials. The issue is more than just porn on YouTube. I'm all for freedom of expression and allowing people to upload whatever they want, but I'm not for dishonesty. And in this overtly sexual world, it gets hard for parents to trust the internet even though its becoming close to impossible to live without it.

True, there's porn on millions of sites which children could easily have access to, but there is a significant difference between that and interest groups purposely tricking and delivering porn to children in a Hannah Montana package on YouTube.