After the tragedy that hit Finland a few days ago, Youtube is accused of spreading dangerous messages and the “masses are calling for more control“. I got invited to the Swiss national radio to make a few points this morning:

• You can’t control media. Get over it!
• The debate is not about YouTube, it’s about video on the web. This guy could have posted the video on his own website. The only way to stop this? Shutting down the internet (in itself an impossible task).
• It might actually be a blessing in disguise that he posted it on YouTube where it could be taken down in a click. Obviously this guy did not have the most effective strategy which would consist in allowing users to download his video (i.e. NOT posting it on YouTube), because spreading the video would have been easier and “outsourced” to viewers, therefore totally impossible to shut down.
• It seems the finish teen was replicating scenes of the Columbine massacre which happened in 1999, 6 years before the birth of YouTube. Inciting messages have spread way before new medias arrived, via TV footages and, in the case of Columbine, cinema when Michael Moore used the footage in his movie. Let’s shut down TV and Cinema then?
• Experts validating content is not a solution from the moment cultures don’t agree on what’s right or wrong. Racist discourse is allowed in the US (I am always shocked to see the yearly Ku Klux Klan gatherings happening in this country, certainly blown out of proportion by the media but still…) and punished by law in France. How to deal with that?
• What is an expert in Youtube videos anyway? Is there such a thing as a PHD in guys-mixing-mentos-with-coke-videos?
• Validating videos does not scale economically, it is way too expensive. Do we therefore shut down a media used in a legal way 99.99% of the time in the name of a few mishaps? As Bruno Giussani used to say back in the early days, “you don’t shut down the postal system because it sometimes delivers a letter bomb!“
• From the moment there is no technical solution, the problem has to be handled by the receivers of the information, i.e. you and me. We need to stop being fascinated by this kind of incidents, creating a hunger for coverage and therefore for more “reward” (in a very sick way of course) for those who create this kind of incidents.
• Again, and from a social perspective, this might be a blessing in disguise. Social media are forcing citizens to use their filters again! We will finally stop believing everything that comes from the media, and start questioning things we took for granted. If the NYT says it it must be true. No no, time to think again, you are responsible of your own truth.

The interview (in french) is archived here.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 1:06 pm and is filed under society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.