Online Warfare: Even the Tamest Video Turns Political
Sprinkled among the more common vulgarities–the "B" word, the "F" word, the other "F" word–one particular insult keeps cropping up among the more than 300 comments that have been left on a YouTube video: 1453.
That was the year that the Greek citadel of Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire, and among the peculiar breed of E-nationalists who fire potshots across the undulating hills of cyberspace, those are fightin' digits.
This particular battle made headlines last week when it got YouTube temporarily banned in Turkey because of videos that were perceived as insulting to Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. It is a crime in Turkey to insult Ataturk.
The ban was lifted after two days, once the videos were removed.
All of this leaves Aki Vretis, a Greek Canadian, perplexed. The video he posted last October on YouTube, the online video-sharing site, is devoted exclusively to the upcoming soccer match on March 24 between Greece and Turkey. Vretis, whose parents are from Rhodes, Greece, is an ardent fan of the Greek team and wanted to confine his video to that subject. At the bottom of the blurb that accompanies the video, he wrote: "Please keep the comments about football [soccer], and the game at hand."
So much for asking politely. The name-calling that erupted on the message board quickly veered from mere accusations of homosexuality to political insults and nationalistic peacocking.
It used to be that the theory of imitations went the other way–"Life Imitates YouTube"–where the popular site, which Google bought last October for $1.65 billion in stock, was the primordial soup for social and political disasters. ("Macaca" is a dish best served hot.)
But the converse holds. Take a political spat anywhere, and in all likelihood you'll find it being sparred out somewhere on YouTube. The site allows one to "reply" to a video with a video of one's own, but far more often the fight moves to the comment section.
"Once you start on a sensitive subject (example: Istanbul/Constantinople), then you can cause a posting storm," Vretis wrote recently in an E-mail. "I always made sure I received an E-mail when someone posted on my page so I could read what people wrote. After a while, I would receive over 20 E-mails an hour. The comments came in like a wildfire."
YouTube does not track complaints it receives by subject, so it's difficult to quantify how many problems this political wrangling causes the website. But among the academic world, there is a rich body of research on what is known as "flaming," hostile, antisocial behavior.
As usual, there is no particular consensus as to how the anonymity and lack of individuality in online forums affects what people write. Andrew J. Flanagin, an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California-Santa Barbara, comes down on the side that people are people, and the protection of a YouTube username doesn't dramatically change things.
"My sense is the kind of people who say this on YouTube are the same kind of people who would say it face to face," he says. (One study he has conducted on what's known as "computer-mediated communication" is available here.)
If such hatred seems forced, he says, it may simply be a matter of access.
"Maybe [the Internet] is just a venue to witness behaviors that we don't witness elsewhere," he says.
On the other hand, Eun-Ju Lee, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California-Davis, argues that a few bad apples–or at least a few radical bad apples–can tip a discussion into oblivion.
"I believe that just a couple of extremists will be sufficient to engage people in often uncivilized, hostile online discourse, who might not do so otherwise," Lee says.
At first, Vretis tried to delete offensive posts, but eventually he just stopped accepting comments altogether.
"It is just too bad that some people take it to the extreme," he said. "And that's when the hate comes in."
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