YouTube: Are Your Children Watching Porn Online?
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To answer the question honestly, most parents would reply, “I have no clue.” If you fall into that category, it is past time for you to rethink your strategy for protecting your children online.
A new study by the Culture and Media Institute found that YouTube, the popular video hosting site, is stuffed full of pornography, easily accessible by your children. Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center summarizes the report:
A search for the word “porn” found more than 330,000 results. Out of the 157 “porn” clips that received more than 1 million views, almost two-thirds (101) advertised themselves to be actual pornography. Those 101 videos had 438,318,147 combined views – or 1.38 views for every man, woman and child in the United States.
You remember YouTube, right? That’s the site where your 12-year-old daughter searches for Disney video clips; a search that could just as easily take her to animations overlaid with pornographic audio or even a video called “Aladdin Porn.”
You should be equally as concerned about turning your PC over to hackers. Being the computer guy who regularly cleans up PCs infected with viruses, trojans, worms and other malware, I know that infections can come by clicking links in YouTube video comments. Your kid, lured by a comment like, “Hey! Check out this cool video by Hannah Montana!”, can head off to a site where she is subjected to a porn clip; or where software is surreptitiously installed on your PC to steal your passwords, credit card info or trash your hard drive.
I know that it is difficult to monitor your offspring’s every mouse click, but it possible to put inexpensive (meaning free) safeguards in place to minimize the possibility that the little crumb snatchers run across something that they shouldn’t see. Check out this article for a highly-customizable filtering service that you can implement without installing any software.
Then, subscribe to this site (enter your email address in the sidebar) because, very soon, I plan to publish an updated version of “Bob’s Cheap But Nearly Foolproof PC Protection and Optimization Plan” so that you can keep your PC running clean and your progeny safe from porn.
Bozell Column: Eye-Opening YouTube | NewsBusters.org
