While reading the Parents Television Council's latest report: The "New" Tube: A Content Analysis of YouTube—the Most Popular Online Video Destination, I kept thinking of Supreme Court Justice William Brennan's eloquent dissent to Pacifica vs. FCC. The 1978 ruling upheld the Federal Communications Commission's sanctioning of a radio station for broadcasting George Carlin's "seven dirty words" routine, but Brennan did not concur. "There are many who think, act, and talk differently from the Members of this Court, and who do not share their fragile sensibilities," he wrote. "It is only an acute ethnocentric myopia that enables the Court to approve the censorship of communications solely because of the words they contain."

Back then, there was no Internet as we love it or hate it today, but Brennan wouldn't be surprised at the PTC's latest broadside, which targets the naughty pictures, sounds, and talk on Google's online video showcase. The survey finds that the top-ranking videos that appear in the sites' most frequently accessed search phrases yield "an extraordinary amount of graphic and adult-themed content." PTC wants something done about that, and about all those gnarly user comments that get posted below the vids, too.

The Council's conclusions come from an analysis of 280 YouTube offerings. When PTC inspectors searched for the term "porn," for example, over a quarter of the videos returned didn't ask for age verification, they claim. Many included ads or links to pornographic Web sites. "Clicking a link would instantly take the user to a webpage containing extremely graphic photos and videos of homosexual and heterosexual oral and anal sex," PTC complains.

The Council also does not like the words that are sometimes spoken in these videos; we could provide a list of the milder terms its inspectors found, but suspect that they were further horrified by items even we avoid using.

While the survey praises YouTube for prohibiting outright pornographic videos and "algorithmically demoting" sexually suggestive fare, the decency group criticizes the company for taking no steps to reign in user comments, which its authors find at least as disturbing as the videos themselves. From July 1, 2008 through August 5, 2008, the PTC's "analysts," as they call themselves, collected not only videos, but user remarks.

PTC's researchers did searches using what they defined as "child friendly" terms. These included "Miley Cyrus," "Jonas Brothers," "High School Musical," and "Hannah Montana," which they say resulted in "highly offensive" content in the text commentary areas below the videos produced by the search."

The Hannah Montana search supposedly picked up a variety of obscenities that indicated YouTube users have a low opinion of the character herself, and suspect her of engaging in various sexual activities. Just out of curiosity, I did my own search on the same name. Here are the first four comments below the first video that I got.

Hannah Montana rules I love shows and music everyday I listen to her music I love the music the most I almost forgot don't let anyone bring you down like monkeygirl324 is trying to do she's jealou.

This is the real Miley!

i love you miley im your number 1 fan

hey how are u?

Not exactly the most scintillating online dialogue I've run into, but pretty far from the PTC's excerpts. In any event, the group wants YouTube to take action on the terrible comments they supposedly found, "by formulating and adopting a thorough, accurate and transparent content rating system which would allow a parent to block a child from viewing age-inappropriate material."

Because YouTube is an Internet service, the Council can't launch the same kind of complaint-driven pressure campaign that it constantly runs against broadcast TV using the FCC's indecency rules. But it can still conduct a moral pressure campaign on advertisers. "Sponsors must maintain a diligent awareness of the material whose distribution they are underwriting with their advertising dollars," the document's conclusion warns.

Apparently, it did not occur to PTC's analysts that the Hannah Montana commentaries they cite may have been written by the very children that the morals group says it wants to protect. Frankly, the comments' tone reminds me of some the more heated comments that occasionally get posted in response stories at Ars Technica. Ars isn't about to implement a system that censored posts without considering their content, and I wouldn't want one the world's most popular Web sites pressured into cooking up a filtering system that blocks words that are used by millions of passionate people to express themselves online about politics and government.

Pacifica vs. FCC, Justice Brennan predicted, will have its biggest impact on broadcasters seeking to reach people "who do not share the Court's view as to which words or expressions are acceptable and who, for a variety of reasons, including a conscious desire to flout majoritarian conventions, express themselves using words that may be regarded as offensive by those from different socio-economic backgrounds."

"In this context," he added, "the Court's decision may be seen for what, in the broader perspective, it really is: another of the dominant culture's inevitable efforts to force those groups who do not share its mores to conform to its way of thinking, acting, and speaking."

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