YouTube, The Great Satan

If you’ve been following me for the past month, you know that I finally finished ‘Burning Passion’--my brutally cynical dark comedy about a guy who ejaculates fire.

I’ve done film festivals, and frankly after playing in more than 50 of them I got tired of showing my work to other people there to show their work to me. Not that they didn’t have good work. Some of them had extraordinary work. But it was at best a mutual admiration society and at worst a mutual bitch session.

So I decided to take an alternate route. I set a date (Valentine’s Day), on which I planned to release the film to the world. For free.

As part of the plan, I put a trailer for the film up on YouTube. And thanks partly to a clever selection of tags and the early and enthusiastic support of a lot of film bloggers, the trailer racked up more than 17,000 hits in two weeks. Not amazing by YouTube standards, but incredibly respectable.

And then YouTube took the trailer down. I got a notice that I had violated Community Guidelines.

The guidelines, in a nutshell, are

No pornography or sexually explicit content
No bad stuff like animal abuse
No graphic or gratuitous violence
No gross-out stuff
No copyright infringement
No hate speech
No predatory behavior
And no misleading tags, titles, or thumbnails.

I’m a firm believer that things are usually named for exactly what they’re not, so the fact that YouTube calls these rules Community Guidelines is a pretty clear indication that there is no community there. In fact, most of the thousands of people who rated the trailer gave it four or five stars, so I think it’s fair to argue that the trailer actually appealed to the community’s shared values.

Whatever.

The part that irks me is that there’s no mechanism to question the decision. Sure, YouTube might argue that a film about a guy who ejaculates fire might somehow violate numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4, but can you say the same thing about the trailer for the film?

Then again, the film is extremely well produced. As is the trailer. I shot everything on 35mm film and even spent a ton of money to hire the same guy to do the voice over for the trailer who does all the Hollywood trailers. So maybe they’re concerned that I violated someone’s copyright by putting it up.

They didn’t ask, and if they had I would have showed them all my cancelled checks, licensing agreements, and copyright certificates.

More likely, someone flagged it.

Flagging is a way the “community” can police YouTube for content they think is inappropriate. In order to educate viewers about how to flag videos, YouTube has created, of course, a video. A video which, among other things, uses a voice over to tell you it’s not okay to post a video showing something shocking while showing images of a man reinserting his intestines into his abdomen.

Call me vengeful, but I think that kind of imagery should not be allowed.

So join me, won’t you, in flagging YouTube’s video. You can find it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA22WSVlCZ4&eurl=http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines. Sure, you won’t accomplish anything, other than tripping some algorithm that identifies you as a troublemaker in the YouTube database. But if enough people get tagged as troublemakers, eventually YouTube will have to concede that we are, fundamentally, its community.