11 April 07“YouTube has no ethics, it's been created for the sole purpose of entertainment and money.” Do you agree?I believe that when the three young men Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim came together to start an internet company, now YouTube, their minds would certainly be on making profits through advertisments on their site and creating fame for themselves. While they may be successful at doing that, they may have just failed at creating an ethical community for people to share videos.
I frequent YouTube. I frequent it for the entertainment it provides. Certain episodes, which I may have missed on television, may be found on the site, courtesy of the kind soul who had recorded and uploaded it onto the YouTube community. For someone like me, who has little time to spare on the television, YouTube provides a convenient source of entertainment during my leisure time. I can watch my favourite shows repeatedly, or even videos that have not crossed the sea into our lands. Hence, I can only associate YouTube with entertainment.
To say that YouTube is not ethical, I have two different views to this matter. Personally, I have viewed many unethical videos making fun of famous political parties, impersonating their voices and making a joke out of them. With reference to the recent ban of access to YouTube in Thailand due to a video showing insult to the King, I believe YouTube isn’t very ethical. However, these videos were uploaded and submitted by different individuals. There are guidelines for submitters to adhere to when sharing a video, and one of the guidelines is not to “ publish falsehoods or misrepresentations that could damage YouTube or any third party; (iii) submit material that is unlawful, obscene, defamatory, libelous, threatening, pornographic, harassing, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive, or encourages conduct that would be considered a criminal offense, give rise to civil liability, violate any law, or is otherwise inappropriate;” While the creators of YouTube have seen this problem, they are unable to do anything about it, except to remove videos that violate these guidelines, which happens only after it has been reported by users. The unethical ones are those who uploaded the videos of bad content.In conclusion, I believe that this situation has two sides to it.
# posted by ^Ic0n^ @ 4/11/2007 08:19:00 PM
