On Tay Zonday and the casual hate speech of YouTube's users
I swear, my browser tunes to websites other than YouTube dot com. It's just, lately, I've felt a great deal of media all focusing on this one web portal, kind of in a way MySpace would never imagine. How often do you spot the new "web phenomenon" video, or any other video someone wants you to see, on MySpace? How about DailyMotion? Google sort of has streaming video nailed to the wall, here, and it's turning into a cultural fixture unto its own. What if there had been one TV network, back in the day, who mopped the floor with all the others, putting them out of business before they ever got going? This is, essentially, what I think is happening. How would someone even begin to compete with their userbase (driving untold volumes of content), interface (improving every day), and brand recognition? As Google became synonymous with searching, YouTube is now fully synonymous with watching user-uploaded video. Only, there is no Live Search or Yahoo equivalent competing in that space.
Really, the only hope for a supplanting competitor would be a scenario where a foreign power, with a "Pirate Bay" mentality, opens the ultimate video sharing site, free of regulation. Remember when all of those Viacom clips of Colbert Report and The Daily Show disappeared overnight on YouTube? If there's soon to be a website where that doesn't happen, YouTube is cooked. In a similar vein, imagine if YouTube didn't relentlessly track down and nullify pornographic uploads, within seconds. Offering free rein to users, in terms of pornographic content uploads on a major mass media site, opens a Pandora's box of "you simply can't do that" issues. Free of regulation, what would become of underage youngsters posting their own homemade pornography? Or what about the privacy issues involved if someone posts a cellphone video of a rape? And, you know, it gets 50,000 views within 3 days? I'd like to think we aren't heading in that direction, as a world society, but I also don't foresee anything getting in the way of such an inevitable outcome, aside from countries unilaterally blocking their citizens access to entire portions of the world wide web. Shit, is that even possible? I happen to think we'd call in airstrikes on any facility hosting servers for such a free market site.
Regardless, policing content on a website with tens of millions of contributing unique users is an enormous task; one which requires intense corporate diligence. Part of filtering is implemented on a software level, but there is always a human element, where you need human beings putting eyeballs on objectionable material, in order to judge it and remove it from existence. There is no doubt that YouTube takes such measures in regards to pornographic material, and there is also no doubt that corporate lawyers are making a similar such effort in terms of removing copyrighted materials, like movies, TV shows, and songs.
Whew. All done moderating, right? Well, not quite. While YouTube is diligently tracking down any and every possible instance of an exposed female areola in even the darkest corners of its site, they do nothing to moderate hate speech. Case in point: the youngster depicted in the upper section of this article. I was slightly (I'm embarrassed to say) captivated by the "Chocolate Rain" web phenomenon a week or two ago, and I viewed the videos with about 500,000 other YouTube perusers. I also kept a careful watch on the "comments" sections of the various videos, as a first-time casual look at the feedback opened, for me, a window into the blatant racism and hate speech running rampant on YouTube's user feedback pages. Tay Zonday is an unassuming young man, with his most catchy song obliquely addressing institutional racism. He has, in no way, done anything to directly provoke hate groups or anti-black hate speech, but in the "comments" sections of his various videos, he's receiving hate speech. He's receiving it in spades.
For the most part, it doesn't look like Mr. Zonday acknowledges this festering underbelly of his burgeoning 15-minute popularity, but it's undeniable. Call up the amassed comments (at the time of this writing, "Chocolate Rain" has 7425 user comments) and do a "CTRL+F" for the word "n*gger." You'll bump into repeated uses of this word, in plain daylight, again and again and again. I mean, look at this! I've compiled a graphic showing a couple of choice (disgusting) entries I saw only days ago (see my continuing commentary after the image):
What is this? Hate speech exists in broad daylight on YouTube, and I'd reckon it's a growing problem. As Barry Bonds approaches Hank Aaron's home run record, we're frequently reminded of the "piles" of hate mail Mr. Aaron received in the run-up to his phenomenal achievement, as though it's some "history lesson" example of archaic American racism. If you want to see exemplary instances of white supremacist hate chat and ignorant, casual affronts to the entire African American ethnicity, look no further than the recent, unmoderated comment pages of YouTube, with popular videos featuring African Americans. If these pages are, indeed, moderated -- and I'm a fool for writing this article -- how is it that this kind of hate speech exists on the videos of one of their most popular current artists?
Much has been made, in recent days, of Bill O'RLY going after the DailyKos blog for their users posting things which his intern staff found to be objectionable. Likewise, Kos supporters are finding examples of threatening speech on Mr. O'RLY's website. YouTube, it seems, is experiencing runaway popularity and runaway forms of new, casual racism, all at once. It's not hate speech which we've put behind us. It's only a manifestation of a problem which still stares us in the face, yet unaddressed. Young people in this country are staggeringly comfortable with throwing around hateful epithets, and I think most people would argue that intolerance doesn't follow too far behind such widespread ignorance. If it's a problem we're actually serious about addressing, the world needs to be exposed to the virulent, brazen racism currently ubiquitous on YouTube entries featuring popular young African Americans. Tay Zonday probably didn't intend to be a poster boy for a victim of modern racism, but I'll be damned if it doesn't look just like that.
Here's an embedded video of Mr. Zonday's catchy, if chorus-lacking, song:
MR. ZONDAY'S MUSIC VIDEO
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