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We certainly listen to our community in many ways. Do you have a listening procedure to monitor such feedback?Ī. What are the tags the uploader has placed on the video? What's the title? How is the video described? What is the focal point of the video? That said, without commenting on the specifics of a particular video, I would say that it would be unusual to consider bare breasts in a painting pornography. We try to understand the uploader's intention in cases of ambiguity. I say usually, because every decision we make about flagged videos is based on context. Nudity in an artistic context usually would fall into the educational, documentary or scientific exception I describe above. Is such an occurrence considered pornography?Ī. In this case, the offending content may have been bare breasts in a fine art photograph.
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(Like most websites, we do have spam fighting technology, but that takes place prior to the process I am describing.) We do not prescreen nor do we automatically remove videos for Community Guidelines violations.
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Once a flagged video is queued for manual review, our reviewers take action quickly, usually in under an hour. Our team of reviewers works 24/7 and in 17 different languages (to be able to evaluate possible hate speech, for example). Every video that is removed from YouTube has passed through a manual review. That's one of the reasons that it's so hard to find porn on YouTube. If the tool detects flesh tones, it will bump the video to the top of the queue for manual review. When a video is flagged by a community member, it passes through a prioritization tool that looks at, among other things, possible flesh tones and the reliability of the flagger (based on the accuracy of previous flags). For example, a documentary on breast cancer would be appropriate, but posting clips out of context from the documentary might not be. There are exceptions for some educational, documentary and scientific content, but only if that is the sole purpose of the video and it is not gratuitously graphic.
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Generally if a video is intended to be sexually provocative, it is less likely to be acceptable for YouTube. We do, however, have an exception to this rule: "Most nudity is not allowed, particularly if it is in a sexual context. They also state that pornography and other sexually explicit content is not allowed. They are written in casual, straightforward language, and contain mostly what you would expect: no hate speech, incitement to violence, animal abuse, and so on. Think of the Community Guidelines as the rules of the road. We count on our users (we call them "community members") to know our Community Guidelines and to flag videos they believe violate the rules. Here's how our content monitoring system works:Įvery minute, 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. Are events like this automated, or are they reviewed by anyone?Ī. I'm now on my fifth reading," he wrote me, putting me in touch with another nice man, Scott Rudin, who told me the content had been reinstated and agreed to answer my questions. "I had every intention of listening to only one. His offended readers couldn't raise a response from YouTube, but I approached them through press channels and quickly heard from a nice man named Ricardo Reyes. In my fantasies he reminds me of a wise old English headmaster. You see what I mean about Tom's eloquence. Listen to it, judge for yourself, and return to read of this happy ending. Some Cynic defined the difference between Art and Pornography - “If you can see things clearly and they are the right colour then it’s pornography." I saw the picture as very old and charming and not pornographic. I was struck by the girl’s beauty and I thought it would add to the mood of the poem. The picture I used is the last link at the bottom of the page. I was looking for an atmospheric illustration for the poem, which does have erotic undertones and is about native peoples and nudity, when I came upon this page about the Rodian people of Sri Lanka. "The poet Michael Ondaatje who wrote The Cinnamon Peeler was born in Sri Lanka. Tom O'Bedlam's offense was apparently to include, in addition to the written text of the poem a brief shot of a woman with her left breast exposed. His poem is one of the most erotic I have ever heard, flowing from love and memory, but that's not why it was taken down. Ondaatje is the Booker Prize-winning author of The English Patient. In a posting he explained that he received a message from YouTube on April 8 informing him: "The following video(s) from your account have been disabled for violating the YouTube Community Guidelines: The Cinnamon Peeler by Michael Ondaatje."
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I believe I recognize his unmistakable voice, but that is for you to decide. The anonymous reader signs himself "Tom O'Bedlam," a name taken from a 17th century poem about a lunatic.
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