A report by the Financial Times last week had claimed that vide service YouTube had turned to its trusted users to police videos that contain objectionable content, Morning Ledger said. The report said the move has allowed Google to control the number of video uploads on its video sharing website that contains content inappropriate to a certain user category.
The FT report also said that YouTube has granted members of this special group privileges that would allow them to flag up to 20 videos for violations on the site's objectionable content rules. FT also claimed that some of the members of the special group that polices videos on YouTube are government organizations, Morning Ledger added.
The Wall Street Journal decided to dig further and said in a separate report that in the group of 200 "super flaggers", the number of government or non-government organizations is less than 10. The newspaper also said that majority of them are just a bunch of people with special privileges accorded to them by YouTube. It has also been reported that individuals or entities will only get a chance to be a part of the special YouTube group by private invitation. The chosen ones, said Morning Ledger, allegedly are picked by YouTube as people who had been spending their time flagging videos for objectionable content.
Morning Ledger said that the special group has aided YouTube's employees in screening tens of thousands of video uploads by people or entities on a daily basis. Aside from helping the video site in tagging such videos for a review for potential objectionable content, these "super flaggers" allegedly could delete the photos or impose age restrictions on videos.
A Google spokesman has since denied the claims in published reports. The spokesman was quoted as saying, "Any suggestion that a government or any other group can use these flagging tools to remove YouTube content themselves is wrong."
