One click from corruption on YouTube

by TOM RAWSTONE

Last updated at 23:09 06 October 2006

Clenched in an over-sized fist, all that can be seen of the wriggling white mouse is its head. Not for long. Into Johnny's mouth it goes. He bites, chews and then spits out.

"Go on, swallow it," a voice off camera says. Johnny does his best to comply, popping the severed head back in, but even with a swig of beer he can't quite get it down. A scene from a cheap horror movie? Unfortunately not.

This piece of video, shot in Northern Ireland, is all too real. It "premiered" last month on the internet - surprise, surprise - appearing on a website - whose popularity has taken the world by storm in the past 12 months.

Called YouTube, its founders boast their video-sharing technology has empowered ordinary members of the public to become "the broadcasters of tomorrow".

Every day, 65,000 new segments of video, shot on mobile phones and video cameras, are added to its archive by members of the public. And 100million such clips are downloaded daily.

Hugely successful in the States, it has proved an equally big hit in Britain where 3.5million people are regular users of the site. In the first six months of this year, the numbers logging on increased by 500 per cent.

But here's the rub. While the majority of clips feature teenage high-jinks (think juvenile You've Been Framed) or the 'e-equivalent' of vanity publishing (wannabe popstars singing Mariah Carey), a Mail investigation has

unearthed a far darker side to this 21st century phenomenon.

A search of the site reveals footage of the Bradford race riots, Hitler's speeches and the Ku Klux Klan, accompanied by the vile, racist views of a legion of neo-Nazis calling for the extermination of 'blacks' and Muslim 'sand n******'.

There are images that glorify football hooliganism; school children 'happy slapping', teenagers 'surfing' on top of moving cars, and child post-mortems.

Were this a movie released at the cinema, it would be X-rated. Instead, it's available to anyone with a computer.

John Carr, new technology adviser of leading children's charity NCH, said: "YouTube is a huge website that millions of people will look at. It is the Speakers Corner of the new century."

The brainchild of cash- strapped twenty-something friends Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the website went live in May last year from a domestic garage in California.

Their idea was simple: to allow people to swop, share and download video clips for free.

Aided by the spread of high-speed internet connections (the higher the speed, the easier it is to watch video clips) and a world where exhibitionism rules, YouTube was swamped with amateur offerings and humorous outtakes from everyday life.

A ratings system was installed, as was a 'most-popular' list that served to flag up offerings its community of users thought worth watching.

So it was that in the past six months the world's first 'YouTube stars' were born - some unwittingly, others more willingly.

There was, for starters, the 79-yearold British pensioner who posted his "geriatric gripes and grumbles" set to a blues music soundtrack, and whose video has so far attracted in excess of half a million viewers.

Then there was the case of the socalled Bus Uncle, a Hong Kong bus passenger whose antics have become an internet legend.

Filmed on a camera phone by a fellow passenger, Elvis Ho, a 23-year-old estate agent, is seen politely asking an older man sitting in front of him to lower his voice.

Unhappy at being tapped on the shoulder, Roger Chan, 51, then launches into a six-minute tirade in Cantonese. He swears, curses, rants, rages and threatens until the thoroughly cowed Ho starts calling Chan "uncle", a Cantonese term of respect.

YouTube is privately owned and free to use. Money is pouring in so fast from advertisers and other spin-offs that analysts estimate the brand is already worth in excess of $1billion.

But forget the breaches of copyright involving material taken from films, television and music videos, the emerging problem is one of content.

While users are told that videos with "nudity, graphic violence or hate" are not allowed, in practice the site is selfregulated, with users asked to flag up content they are unhappy with. The result? Something of a free-for-all.

Most controversial of all is the way in which YouTube has been used to host footage from Iraq showing U.S. service personnel being blown up or shot.

Not only is the violence explicit (a soldier steps out of a Humvee and is engulfed in flames as a radio-controlled bomb explodes; an American Marine is hit by a sniper's bullet as he chats to children) but it is often used as a recruiting tool by Muslim extremists.

Take the video of a 16-ton Stryker armoured vehicle flipped over by a bomb buried in a road west of Baghdad. Private Dan Dolan, 19, the driver, from the town of Roy, Utah, was mortally wounded in the attack, while the other soldier inside was killed instantly.

First issued by a Sunni terrorist group calling itself Jaish al-Mujahedeen, or the Army of Holy Warriors, the video is accompanied by Islamic music and the recitation of Koranic verses.

"Putting it on the internet like this is rubbing it in our faces," explains Tim Dolan, the dead man's father.

Some will claimthe footage aids free speech. Take a glance, then, at the exchange of views posted alongside another video of American soldiers being blown up by a roadside bomb. In bold are the usernames of those posting the comments.

Rulex40: "Good shot" 300MSmokey: "Salaam and hi to all. While the U.S. fights a losing battle, guns blazing against Islam in the Middle East, we Muslims are growing in numbers all over the world, including the U.S."

S***biscuit: "Why would you post that!! You are so gay! You fxxxxx raghead! That s*** needs to happen to you! Fxxxxx sandn*****."

Vzlsleszv: "Fxxx Islam, fxxx ragheads and fxxx the Middle East. I wish Bush just nuked the entire fxxxxxx Middle East and be done with it."

Or consider this, the 'debate' that accompanied footage of a Muslim protest held in London earlier this year, against the publication of cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed.

Ukthisp***: "Vile filthy unclean s***s of Islam."

Palermo83: "This the 'pacifist Muslims'??? Fxxx the Arabs, go out of Europe you fxxxxxx sand n******."

Neonvoid666: "Fxxx off you Muslim xxxxx go back to your slums back in the third world before we the white people of GREAT BRITAIN kick you xxxxx out so beware!!!"

Just weeks ago, British far-Right extremists posted a series of videos on the site that were clearly intended to mimic the tactics of Islamic jihadists.

In one clip a man brandishing a footlong hunting knife with a serrated blade warns: "We are going to rip the life out of you. I am going to tear your guts out. I'll cut your head off.

"You come over here, you bomb us, disgrace us, you spit on our heritage, you want the Union Jack banned, you want your own flag flying over Parliament ... it ain't gonna happen."

Children's charities fear material on the site could lead youngsters astray. One can only guess, for instance, what effect watching a video of a three-year-old girl undergoing a postmortem, or seeing a man's arm ripped off by a crocodile can have on a child.

(Users are told the site is not for people under the age of 13. But registration simply requires users to enter their age, and it is not verified.)

The fear is that exposure to such images is desensitising, something that is hinted at in the following exchange posted alongside footage of an American F16 bombing a crowd of people in Iraq.

The clip was posted by an 18-year-old

British youth, using the name KI11ER, who boasts: "I've seen shrapnel wounds, exicutions (sic), beheading etc in videos and it makes my mouth water. I am joining the Army (British) so I can kill people in a way that is morally acceptable to me."

One video shows two girls rolling on the ground punching one another in the face. When a male student tries to break them up, he is pulled off and told to get out of the way of the camera.

"Some of the stuff they put up on their site is absolutely disgraceful," Mr Carr told the Daily Mail. "What they are actually doing is inviting children to go and commit crimes, by assaulting each other or by risking serious injury, and then have their five minutes of fame on the web."

Across the internet online chat sites proliferate with advice on how to become the next YouTube star, the majority of recommendations focusing on getting drunk and filming the consequences. Hardly surprising, then, that people should go to the extremes demonstrated by Johnny - aka the Belfast Mouse Eater.

The case is being investigated by the Ulster Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which fears they are seeing the start of a new, sick trend.

"The USPCA has recently dealt with incidents in which the abuse and killing of animals has been recorded on mobile phones and circulated within schools," said Stephen Philpott, the charity's chief executive.

"The use of the internet is a logical advance for exhibitionist abusers, and we require the operators of websites to monitor the material they make available. If this trend continues, websites must be made to accept responsibility for their actions and the legal consequences."

The subject of accountability is one that is taken up by John Beyer, director of Mediawatch, who believes that some form of international agreement is needed to regulate such internet sites.

"It's all very well for Eric Schmidt, the Google CEO, to tell the Conservative Party conference 'please don't try to control internet content"," says Mr Beyer.

"But if we're going to have any constraints on violent images, governments have got to decide whether they're going to let the internet run away with democracy, or whether democracy says 'We do think you should be constrained in some way to stop you undermining civil society', which I think is what is happening.

"The Government is cracking down on violent pornography, but there has to be some control on other damaging content. It has to be done on an international scale.There has to be a code of practice, or guidelines, where someone says: 'We're not having this, you have to take it down.'"

It's a point echoed by Matthew Collins, director of anti-fascist organisation Searchlight. He says in the 1980s and 90s there were successful prosecutions brought against racist publications, but that the internet is proving a harder nut to crack.

"There is a difference between free speech and incitement to racial hatred. This is not a question of free speech," he says.

Why then can't the software be used to control other offensive and inflammatory content? It's a question YouTube appears strangely reluctant to answer. Contacted repeatedly by the Mail, the company did not respond to our enquiries.

Unless more effective screening is put in place, YouTube will continue to disseminate more videoclips filled with hatred, violence and abuse.