In light of a new YouTube killer going on a shooting spree, should the Google-owned video sharing site be doing more about content of this nature?
Finland Student Massacre
On Tuesday September 23rd, 2008, Matti Saari, a 22-year-old student from the Kauhajoki School of Hospitality in Finland, murdered ten people in the college exam hall.
This is clearly a tragedy of untold proportions, and is a massacre that echoes the Columbine school shootings from 1999 and a similar killing spree by Pekka-Eric Auvinen last year.
Threatening YouTube Videos
But in the weeks leading up to this disgusting act of savagery, Saari uploaded various videos to YouTube that showed him firing a handgun and threatening anyone watching the clips.
So the questions that have to be asked are: Could this tragedy have been prevented by police taking the YouTube clips more seriously?; Should the videos have been on YouTube in the first place?
Police Questioning
On Monday, the day before the attack, police actually did question Saari about the YouTube videos showing him making threats and practising his shooting skills. But because he had the correct gun license, no action was taken.
The problem is that the gunman hadn’t actually committed any crime prior to Tuesday’s killing spree, so the police were powerless to arrest him and could only really endeavour to watch his behaviour in future.
YouTube Filtering
The same goes for YouTube, as though violence isn’t allowed to be shown in videos on the site, Saari only videoed himself making seemingly idle threats to the people watching his uploads.
There is a case for YouTube to start filtering videos during the upload process to prevent any that go against the TOS actually making it on to the site, but it’s likely that Saari’s videos would have been given the all-clear even if this practice was undertaken as a matter of course.
Who’s To Blame?
Some commentators have suggested that YouTube or Google are somehow to blame for this tragedy, which they clearly aren’t. But it is a worrying trend that serial killers who go postal like this seem to want to document their activities on video sharing sites beforehand.
The gunman’s videos, which were thought to include several showing him practising at a shooting range, have now been removed from YouTube. Whether they should have been on there in the first place is the bigger question.
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