That raises an entirely new question: What if a child goes to YouTube looking for graphic sexual material? They're going to find it. A random search for "sex" will give you a long list of videos. One search found a video from Playboy, with a buxom blonde Playmate discussing the latest research on the alleged correlation between hand size and penis size. YouTube's monitors leave this alone, since it has no graphic sexual imagery. That Playmate video in turn links to Playboy's own YouTube channel, where it currently stores 322 Playboy videos.
The promotional video there features actress and Playboy regular Carmen Electra discussing her latest photo shoot for the Playboy cover. As she poses provocatively, she says, "I feel a little bit shy taking it all off again, but it's been really fun. I like it." Click on the juiciest-sounding clips, and there's a message saying, "This video or group may contain content that is inappropriate for some users, as flagged by YouTube's user community." Users then would have to register their e-mails and claim they're 18 or older, an easy hurdle for a devious teen.
But the porn-site operators are posting often enough with videos that don't cross YouTube's lines, but carry their own website addresses -- from "40 Inch Plus" to "Jitterville" -- to lure viewers away to the raunch. YouTube is a very effective gateway to hard-edged pornography for new fans -- even junior-high fans.
In its first analysis of online media, the Parents Television Council found the 20 highest-ranked YouTube videos from each of the site's most popular search terms yielded graphic and adult-themed content. Take Li'l Wayne, one of the hottest rappers, nominated for eight Grammy awards: 98 percent of the videos analyzed in a Li'l Wayne search did not raise any hurdle of age limitation, although 50 percent of the videos associated with the rapper featured verbalized expletives, including several variations of the F-bomb, and explicit references to human anatomy -- like Wayne's call for loving on his song "Lollipop."
As more people find video entertainment outside the television set, the old struggles over indecency are going to look quaint. The worry that children are going to stumble into shocking and disturbing content they're not ready to see will only grow. The Bush-era FCC couldn't do much to restrain the small universe of video producers in broadcast TV. There's no room for optimism that parents could construct a dam to prevent a deluge of sleaze in 13 hours of video uploads each minute on YouTube.