HOWZAT

Mr Barron said the videos would not have been removed before Friday because there was nothing in YouTube’s rules barring the posting of gang videos.

“There used to be a set of guidelines for material that was unacceptable, that was hate speech, pornography and violence or threats against a particular person. What we realised was that the type of videos that cause so much concern in Britain wasn’t caught under those guidelines so, as a result of listening to people’s concerns, we’ve decided to include brandishing of weapons and non specific threatening behaviour. We’re in a new era now where that kind of video is classed as unacceptable and will be removed in future.”

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith tonight welcomed YouTube’s change of policy.

"I am extremely pleased that YouTube have today taken action to ban videos glamorising weapons. This is a real step forward. I would like to see other internet service providers follow suit to reinforce our message that violence will not be tolerated either on the internet or in the real world.”

According to research by Nielsen Online, YouTube is the fourth most popular website among British children, visited by 590,000 two to 11-year-olds every month and a further one million children aged 12 to 17. Earlier this year it was heavily criticised when it emerged that a video of a woman allegedly being gang-raped was viewed 600 times before YouTube removed it. It was also revealed the video had been flagged once already.

Concerns about the way sites such as YouTube deal with such material were raised by the House of Commons Culture Media and Sport Select Committee which published a report on harmful material on the internet and in video games in July.

According to the report, one in six children between eight and 15 have viewed “nasty, worrying and frightening” content on the internet. It expressed concern that material on sites such as YouTube do not carry any age classification “nor is there a watershed before which it cannot be viewed.”

In some cases rather than remove a video, YouTube classifies it as “inappropriate for some users” in which case anyone wanting to view it is required to verify they are 18 or over by signing in or registering on the site. Anyone who’s user profile indicates they are under 18 is then blocked from viewing it. However, there is nothing to stop users lying about their age or to prevent under-18s from creating a new user profile with a different date of birth.

The select committee’s Chairman, John Whittingdale MP, said YouTube’s system for dealing with harmful and inappropriate material was generally effective but he was not convinced it could not be doing more. He said Google had told his committee it was going to “tighten procedures for removing inappropriate material.... Clearly from the evidence you have gathered they still have a long way to go.”

Communications regulator Ofcom has also criticised YouTube’s review process as “opaque” adding that “because it is impossible to determine what proportion of content is potentially harmful, there is no means to assess the overall effectiveness of the system”. It called on the industry to draw up a code of practice requiring sites such as YouTube to increase the transparency of their review processes “for example by reporting on times for dealing with ‘flags’.”

When The Times asked Google’s Peter Barron how many people YouTube has monitoring inappropriate material and how much material it removes every day, he said it was the company’s policy not to give such figures but that it represented a “tiny tiny proportion” of the total content. He denied the company’s refusal to provide figures meant there was no way of judging how effective YouTube’s system of self-regulation is.

"We can be judged on the kind of exercise you have undertaken,” he said. “ You got us on the cusp of a change in policy, you'll have to look again in a few weeks time [to judge if it's working]."