Ever post a video at youtube.com and get a racist comment? Youtube.com makes it difficult to report

I posted a video a while back on youtube.com and today I got a racist poster who dropped the "N" bomb on it in the viewer comments section. Needless to say I deleted it and blocked this viewer but when I tried to report them to youtube.com, I found out that this is next to impossible to do.

If you follow their "reporting" links they all lead to "helpful tips" pages which basically don't give you any REAL option to ACTUALLY report such racist speech (or other problems) directly to them at all.

I believe that they don't want to be informed and therefore be obligated to take real action against the racists/haters who post such comments on their site. They want to have a see no evil, hear no evil, do no evil policy where they can claim plausible deniability when someone uses their website to spread hate speech.

Ultimately after much looking I found that they do have two actual email addresses that you can send a real email to, or you can call them on the phone.

They seem to go out of their way to make it difficult to deal with such people other than to individually block them from posting comments on your own site - they seem to not feel they have any obligation to police their site for racist/hate speech posters.

In my opinion, the doctrine of "qui tacit consentire" applies here - silence implies consent.

If youtube.com fails to act diligently to prevent hate speech on their site they are granting implicit consent.

I think they deserve an earful about this issue - DU it DU'ers.

Here are the email addresses I discovered:

press@youtube.com
security@youtube.com

My email to them:


To the Security Team at Youtube.com:

http://www.youtube.com/user/MattD023

This user recently posted racist comments on my youtube video which I have subsequently deleted.

I have also blocked this user from posting on my site.

This said, you guys really have NO pro-active system to deal with abusive and/or racist posters on your website – your “helpful tips” are truly a useless cop-out on your part – a way for you to pretend like you are doing something about it without actually removing the offensive comments, preventing their posting in the first place and blocking the haters from using your website.

If you fail to perform your due diligence through your failure to act you are tacitly offering consent to such hate speech.

By failing to act diligently to prevent this activity, you are allowing youtube.com to become a propaganda tool for spreading hate speech that will result in violations of people’s civil liberties, discrimination, hatred and even may result in violent actions being encouraged by what these haters post on your website.

I don’t want your useless “helpful tips” when I click to report hate speech - I want an obvious email address where I can report these people and I want you to promptly investigate them and block them from ever using your site again. If you don’t want to start taking this issue seriously I happen to personally know a few United States Congressmen who might want to make an issue of it with your company.

Irritated,...

Almost as bad as 4chan sometimes.

They just have more important things to do and can't be bothered with bickering between two users.

and some joker showed up and dropped the N bomb making nasty remarks about Barack Obama - not simply pissed at me. And my video post wasn't even about Obama. It was clearly racist/hater speech, not user to user "bickering". Don't belittle the issue please.

Doug D.

If they do not, they are providing a forum for hate speech.


This is not bickering between two users.

They never appear to do anything about it.

than it does not seem to be that much of a problem.

I guess you would like Youtube to ban these members permanently from their site. But then it is trivially easy to open another Youtube account to once again be able to post comments. And where should they draw the line? Obviously the N word is racist, but what about anti-South bias, comments about "rednecks", hurtful remarks about people's weight and so on. They probably don't wnat to invest an enormous effort in drawing up a code of acceptable and unacceptable comments, with associated penalties, given that you can already simply remove any comment you don't like and block any member from posting comments.

Just because I can ban that person from talking to me doesn't mean that racists can't in turn use youtube as a platform to proselytize to other racists and that some people don't report such comments.

After needing it a few times during the election, I bookmarked it.

Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/safety_help


It makes you go through several pages, but eventually you get to one where you can enter the commenter's user name and their racist comment.


Hope this helps!