News . UK panel wants more vetting of video websites

By Peter Griffiths

LONDON (Reuters) - Video-sharing websites like YouTube must do more to protect people from the Internet's "dark side" such as pornography or images of child abuse or bullying, an influential group of British parliamentarians said on Thursday.

Parliament's Culture, Media and Sport Committee said sites which publish pictures, videos or other material from the public should vet the content far more closely.

Without proper checks, sites may unwittingly publish pornography, child abuse or other illegal content, the lawmakers said in a report.

YouTube told the committee that checking everything before publication was impractical because 10 hours of material is added every minute. However, the legislators rejected that, saying some sites already vet all content.

"To plead that the volume of traffic prevents screening of content is clearly not correct," they said in their report. "Providers such as MySpace have not been deterred from reviewing material posted on their sites.

"Pro-active review of contents should be standard practice for sites hosting user-generated content."

The committee said the need for change was highlighted by an alleged gang rape video that was posted on YouTube and viewed 600 times before being removed.

They dismissed YouTube owner Google's argument that sites should not have to check all content, just as telephone companies and email providers do not monitor all traffic.

Phone calls and emails are typically meant to remain private, whereas user-generated content is deliberately put into the public domain, the lawmakers said.

They said sites should hire extra staff to pre-check material and use better automatic filters.

Instead of new laws being drafted to clamp down on sites, the committee said the industry should adopt tighter self-regulation.

Committee Chairman John Whittingdale said the Internet industry has a duty to protect vulnerable people.

"The Internet...is overwhelmingly a force for good," he said. "However, there is a dark side and many parents are rightly anxious about the dangers to their children."

In a statement, Google said YouTube reviews half of all material flagged by other users as inappropriate within 30 minutes and most of the rest within an hour.

"For YouTube we have strict rules on what's allowed, and a system that enables anyone who sees inappropriate content to report it to our 24/7 review team and have it dealt with promptly," it said.

"We educate our community on the rules and include a direct link from every YouTube page to make this process as easy as possible for our users.

"Given the volume of content uploaded on our site, we think this is by far the most effective way to make sure that the tiny minority of videos that break the rules come down quickly."

(Editing by Angus MacSwan)