'Ya Dun Goofed': Evidence That Censorship Is Both Needed And Not Needed

from the you-been-reported-to-the-cyberpolice dept

If you happen to keep up with the latest internet memes (you know who you are), you almost certainly have heard about the whole “ya dun goofed”/Jessi Slaughter saga. If you (lucky you) aren’t aware of this, and wish to find out (and, I warn you, you may be better off not knowing about this), all the details are at that link. Frankly, after watching the key videos, embedded below, the whole thing really feels faked for the sake of attention. The whole thing is so over the top that it feels like a calculated attempt to get viral YouTube fame.

Either way, whether it’s real or not, what’s fascinating is how different people have reacted to it. Over at NewTeeVee, there’s an interview with Kenyatta Cheese, where he notes that the most fascinating thing about it is that after the video above happened, there was another video chat (via Stickam), where a bunch of the folks who had supposedly been egging Jessi on, really are incredibly nasty to her in a chat, and she totally ignores it. I mean totally ignores all sorts of angry insults. For whatever reason, YouTube has taken that video down due to a “terms of use” violation, so you can’t see it, but you can imagine it (I saw it before it was taken down). Basically, a few folks were chatting by video, and in the text chat, people were hurling all of the worst kinds of slurs at Jessi, and she acts in the complete opposite way as in the video above: no crying, no anger. She just focuses on other folks.

As Kenyatta notes:

What’s more interesting to me is the fact that just after her very public breakdown, she went back on Stickam a few hours later, completely unfazed by the insults being hurled at her…. The chat is filled with the kind of stuff that parents would call ‘bullying,’ however, she’s totally ignoring it all. Clearly the internet has created a new kind of teenager, able to filter out the kind of noise that would “ruin” the life of folks like Star Wars Kid just years before.

That seemed interesting to me, though, I’m not sure I buy that. First of all, it’s a single anecdote involving a single person and (again), I’m still not convinced this is real.

After reading that interview earlier, I had considered doing a post about that claim of the “new kind of teenager,” but figured that the “evidence” was so weak, it wasn’t worth it. However, I was then amused to look at the submissions for Techdirt, and find a note from reader athe pointing to a professor in Australia who is using the saga as evidence of why the internet should be censored. In other words, he looks at the same videos and comes to the exact opposite conclusion as Kenyatta did.

Where Kenyatta sees a teenager who can filter out bullying and get on with her life, Professor Matt Warren, looks at it and sees a horrible, out of control internet that needs to be censored.

Professor Matt Warren, the head of Deakin University’s School of Information Systems, said as long as parents who don’t understand the internet kept giving their children access to it, there needed to be ways to control its use.

“You simply can’t have free access to the internet,” he said.

“It has to be controlled, censored and people have to be held accountable for their actions on it.

“We punish people who drink, we punish people who speed and we have to implement laws to that effect when it comes to the internet.”

Thankfully, people are taking professor Warren to task in the comments on that article, noting that censoring Jessi wouldn’t have helped. The Australian internet filters certainly wouldn’t have stopped the ability of a girl to go online and make some videos. The real issue (if this story is actually real — but it would apply to others as well), is that this is yet another example of where better parenting, rather than Big Brother governing, would probably help out. And, no, that doesn’t mean spying on everything a kid does, but getting parents to at least talk to their kids about what happens online, and what their kids are doing online, along with the risks associated with being online.

Filed Under: australia, censorship, cyberbullying, teenagers, viral videos