YouTube's crackdown on suggestive content

"It's a bad week for Internet porn,"a Wired blogger reports. Indeed. Given the news from Ning and now with YouTube "cracking down on sexually suggestive content," as VentureBeat reports. Here's some of what YouTube's crackdown looks like: "Videos that are 'sexually suggestive' (but not prohibited) will now be age-restricted to viewers 18 or older [if younger ones are truthful about their ages when they register]. In addition, these types of videos will be algorithmically demoted on pages like 'Most Viewed' and 'Top Favorites'." Also, "thumbnails" (little still images that represent videos in YouTube) will be automatically generated by the site rather than chosen by the videos' creators. You see, people would put sexy "thumbnails" at the midpoint of their videos even if they had nothing to do with sex just to game the system and get them to rise to the top, and more likely to be seen. The result was index pages of thumbnails suggesting a lot more sex-related stuff than was actually there, making the site look more disturbing to parents than it needed to be and, for advertisers, apparently not a great environment for their ads. I touch on this in "Watch this video, parents!" Here's the rest of it from YouTube itself.

Ning to delete all adult content

Ning, a site where anyone can create his or her very own social-networking site (see "Mini-MySpaces") and where people are doing so at a rate of "around 2,000 new networks a day, announced the end of its "red-light district" this week . It's a relatively small red-light district - Ning told me less than 1% of its more than 600,000 social networks - but apparently legal adult content was becoming a business problem. "We don’t want to be in the policing business and, unchecked, that's where this is heading," CEO Gina Bianchini wrote in Ning's blog. Ning has a reputation for strict compliance with federal law requiring ISPs to report illegal child-abuse imagery ("child porn"), so that was never allowed, but the legal stuff, Bianchini indicates, interestingly, was creating "a rise in volume of illegal adult social networks." The adult networks disappear by January 1, she said. This development is great news for all the other social-network creators - teachers, parents, artists, athletes, journalists, hobbyists, cancer survivors, alumni groups, government entities (e.g., the US State Department), and businesses. But if anyone's eyebrows are raised upon hearing that all these social site owners were on the same service as porn operators, it's important for you to know that people don't browse around Ning the way they might, possibly, a social networking site (and even then, most teen users just go to their own and their friends' profiles). Ning isn't a social site. It's a giant collection of social sites. Its member social networks are the destinations, not Ning itself. Here's coverage at CNET. A bit more interesting data on Ning as a global resource from Fast Company magazine last May: "About 40% of Ning's social networks originate outside the United States, and members from 176 countries have signed up, with the service already available in several languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and Dutch."