On the heels of the YouTube Music Awards, David Lowery, on his site The Trichordist, calls on artists to hold YouTube accountable for some of the content it allows on its site. In particular, Lowery makes the point that it is young kids who tend to use YouTube for music more than almost any other service, and that for this reason alone, it’s worth addressing the monetization of rape videos, other violence against women, beheadings, hate group and terrorist recruitment videos, and animal torture videos. By way of example, Lowery writes, “Would an artist host the Grammys if The Recording Academy were in the business of distributing cat kicking videos? (That would never get past CBS’s standards and practices)”
As stated in my recent piece about Facebook briefly allowing the same beheading video Lowery refers to as still available on YouTube, users don’t seem to buy the First Amendment argument being made by internet companies eager to leave this kind of content on their pages. Artists have a long tradition of holding corporations accountable for this type of endorsement or profiteering; we’ll see who responds to Lowery’s plea.
