Breaking Free

Youtube video sites are everywhere on the Internet, and are showing up on almost everybody’s reports these days.  I have been spending a couple of months researching youtube sites, and I believe there is no other program able to handle them as well as Covenant Eyes.  So I thought I’d pass on some of the things I’ve learned.

First of all, congratulations to youtube for two important things.  Youtube is very diligent at prohibiting actual nudity.  There is a LOT of blatant sexual imagery on many youtube videos, but at least they draw the line at actual nudity.  And, youtube also has a button that you can click if you want to ‘flag’ a site that you think is objectionable.  Youtube actually pays attention to your opinion!!

We at Covenant Eyes have recently added some logic to our scoring system that enables us to detect sites that are highly objectionable, and our filter and our reports are now pretty good at sifting them out.

Youtube still has its pitfalls.  We have not found it possible to analyze the videos themselves, so we must rely on the text associated with the videos.  Fortunately, this works very well, and in the coming weeks you should see a great improvement on how youtube sites are scored.

Nevertheless, we still tend to score most youtube sites above zero.  The reason for this is that our Age-Based Sensitivity levels on our filter are set up so that the most sensitive setting blocks anything above a zero.  I believe that very young children (and also mature adults who have a real struggle with Internet use) should not have unsupervised access to youtube.  There simply is too much on youtube that can create a struggle for those users.

For sites that are flagged by many youtube users, youtube requires a login/password by a person over 18 years old.  Any sites that are so flagged tend to score very high (15 or above, and in many cases higher than 30) on the Covenant Eyes system.  Accountability Partners should watch for a pattern of usage that includes numerous youtube sites scoring higher than 30.  A simple question like ‘tell me about all these high-scoring youtube sites’  will usually open the dialogue.