What’s Next?

I’m pleased to see the government bringing out what looks like intelligent measures to fight cyber bullying. I’m also happy they’re actually working with companies like YouTube instead of decrying them as unfixable evil.

There’s been a lot of noise about teaching unions wanting to shut down YouTube outright, or at least block it within schools. The trouble with this is blocking within schools doesn’t address the problem. Bullying uses of YouTube are in the minority and throwing the whole thing is impracticable at this point. Given how easy YouTube makes marking ‘inappropriate’ videos for removal, this should be where the future of this discussion lies.

Simply banning YouTube within schools doesn’t solve the problem as cyber-bullying is so insidious precisely because it isn’t rooted at school, students are still free to offensively use it yet schools have closed themselves off from being able to monitor the problem. Schools need to be actively pushing themselves into YouTube, setting up alerts on keywords related to the school and teaching students how to (and that they should) flag up offending videos. Banning it simply sends the message to the bullies that it’s their domain. If schools start to take ownership, this message could be reversed.

Now having a look around on the subject, I ran across this.

Teachers are demanding that YouTube, the hugely popular video sharing website, be closed down for refusing to remove violent, threatening and sexual content involving children and staff.

If this was true and YouTube were ‘refusing’ to take down such videos, it absolutely wouldn’t be something that could be trusted on the web, let alone in schools. Deeper in the article I found an example that made reassured me about exactly what ‘refusing’ entailed but also showed a different nature to the problem.

This month three pupils at Hayling College, Hayling Island, Hampshire, were suspended after mobile phone footage of two girls fighting was placed on YouTube. Max Bullough, the college’s headteacher, said he had great difficulty getting the video taken down and eventually had to turn to the police.

Bullough found he was unable to ‘flag up’ the video for YouTube’s attention because he was not a member of the site and then he could not find contact details. ‘They don’t seem to operate a complaints policy,’ he said. ‘They say they have a team who deal with flagged up content operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but I don’t believe it.’

The problem here is that instead of working through the system in place, Mr Bullough decided to instead ignore it completely and then complain. From my perspective registration is free and easy if he’d done so he’d have been able to flag up the video before a lot of people had seen it. In fairness however, that’s a lot of seemingly un-necessary steps for someone in unfamiliar territory to go through. This isn’t an isolated mindset and so YouTube needs to reach out here.

It makes perfect sense to need users to register before flagging so schools should be given incentives to create accounts, more powers on YouTube might help them be more willing to engage. I’m envisioning trusted accounts for schools that have the power to remove videos instantly, but which is quickly followed up by a review from YouTube. Accounts that consistently remove videos according to the Terms of Use would be allowed to continue, whilst those that abuse their power would be relegated to the standard flagging power. What I’d really love to see are some stats from YouTube about the processes of removal. Their press page says videos are reviewed ‘within minutes’ and given what I’ve seen I’m inclined to believe them, but I’d like to see something more numeric than that to convince sceptics.

They do have a complaints page, but I will agree it is not easy to find, in fact the only public email address I can find are for security issues and the press. A separate contact for dealing with institutions like schools would be a good idea.

YouTube needs to make it easy for people who don’t really want to deal with it too much to talk to them. Otherwise it and the huge number of educational videos on it might be on the outside for a long time. This is a double blow to students as they lose the educational material inside and when outside still have to face cyber bullying because schools have abdicated responsibility for dealing with it.

Other problems such as camera-phones in classrooms don’t have easy solutions. Of course, for a mindlessly technical solution to the problem, there exist prototypes of boxes that sit in rooms and blind any camera lens they see. Whilst I’m slightly concerned about the potential abuses of the technology (couple a few of them with the pain ray and you have a mobile torture squad that can’t be photographed), this is exactly the sort of situation a VERY low cost version would be perfect. In the meantime we might actually have to give teachers some usable powers over students, and no one wants that.