A new Web worry: amateur videos

As if porn sites and pedophiles in chat rooms weren’t frustrating enough for parents whose children use the Internet, now online postings of amateur video featuring skin and violence are raising concerns.

The explosion in online video-sharing sites, where clips of any nature can be easily uploaded for the world to see, has become the latest challenge for parents trying to protect their children and for Web sites coping with obscene submittals.

Carol Kiesman, a mother and teacher in Houlton, Maine, enrolled her 14-year-old daughter in a cyberspace club called “Zoey’s Room,” so the teen could chat away online with other girls in a gated community where all participants are screened.

Imagine then how Kiesman cringed when she saw her daughter, 10-year-old son and fourth-grade students recently encounter homemade videos online that included nudity and animal cruelty.

“I don’t like that innocent kids can click on stuff like that,” Kiesman said. “What you view as entertainment as an adult shouldn’t be entertainment for 13-year-olds.”

Popular Web sites such as MySpace, YouTube, Yahoo, Google and soon also Microsoft Corp.’s MSN are featuring user-generated videos that quickly have become a phenomenal form of entertainment. YouTube, the leading video site that helped catapult the genre with its public launch in December, attracted more than 20 million visitors in May. The company says it averages 50,000 new video uploads per day.

The infectiousness of the video-sharing sites – users can quickly e-mail friends and family to alert them to favorite videos – has created feverish sensations: The uncanny star of “The Evolution of Dance,” a comedic performance of different dance styles, has amassed more than 25 million page views in two months to become the all-time most viewed video on YouTube, and the explosive backyard science experiment of mixing Mentos candies with Diet Coke has snowballed into hundreds of copycats, remixes and spin-offs.

Within minutes, an auteur’s work could be viewed by thousands. At some Web sites, videos garnering the most page views are automatically pushed to a highlighted list or “most popular” section.

But alongside the cute animal tricks, comic sports bloopers and corny lip-synching sessions are extremely weird antics and crude clips of bondage or masturbation. There’s a plethora of videos of people vying for some attention and young women flaunting their bodies.

Some viewers, including Ellen Harris of Palo Alto, Calif., consider the racier posts as an outgrowth of today’s culture.

“We certainly shake our heads when we see certain stuff, but there’s stuff like that on prime-time TV as well,” said the mother of three teenagers.

To raise parents’ awareness that explicit or inappropriate videos could be accessible to children through popular Web video sites, the New York State Consumer Protection Board last month issued a consumer alert and pushed Google Inc. to do more to protect children.

“Parents have a hard enough time policing the Internet without Google Video making it easier to see and to save these types of videos,” said Teresa Santiago, the board’s chair.

While catering to a mass audience whose entertainment tastes run the gamut, the online video Web sites are aware of the challenges they face in welcoming uncensored clips. They strive to be an open stage for budding musicians, comedians and filmmakers, but they also don’t want to drive away offended viewers or advertisers.

“We are concerned about this issue and are aware that it affects most services that make video available on the Internet,” Google stated in response to the New York consumer board alert.

One dilemma is that while some videos could be considered offensive or inappropriate for underage viewers, they don’t necessarily amount to pornographic or obscene material, which is denounced on YouTube, MySpace, Yahoo and Google.

The Web sites require that those uploading a video sign off on an agreement acknowledging the prohibition of obscene submittals, such as pornography or nudity. But users who click to agree to those terms can ignore it and post anyway, slipping the clips online for a while before they get pulled.

Those top Web sites all rely on viewers to alert them to objectionable clips – a form of community policing that has been used for years by other Internet stalwarts such as auctioneer eBay Inc. and classifieds ads provider Craigslist.

YouTube spokeswoman Julie Supan said “the really objectionable material gets flagged very quickly” – and is pulled from the site usually within 15 minutes.