The Classic Flagger
The Classic Flagger is the prime example of how YouTube envisions how flagging should work. This is the type of flagger that YouTube relies on:
“The next time you come across inappropriate content on the site, flag it! We’re counting on you.”
Only flagging a video when it clearly violates YouTube’s Terms of Service (TOS) and thus keeping the platform clean from spam, racism, violence and other unwanted practices. Some flaggers have a clear agenda in their flagging practices in accordance with the TOS. A prime example is BullyingUK, an account set up by the organization of the same self-explanatory name. They’ve also uploaded a movie in which the founder explains how to flag videos on ‘bullying’ to inform the community.
The Angry Flagger
Also known under the more widely known phenomenon ‘haters’. Haters are to be found in complex discussions such as religion and politics, where there’s a certain overlap with the ‘Self-Righteous Flagger’. A lot of ‘haters’ also address less complex subjects such as showing a general dislike towards anime, emo or alike; which results into account descriptions of anime channels containing sentences like:
“Stop letting flaggers get rid of all the anime
Anime Rules”
But the most interesting ‘haters’ are the self-referential accounts that address aspects of the system itself. An activity that caused a lot of irritation in particular amongst the community was the use of misleading thumbnails and/or titles of videos. This came to a highlight with the Internet meme called ‘RickRolling’ in 2008; a hype to YouTube links to people directing them to a videoclip of Rick Astley’s song “Never Gonna Give You Up” instead of the video they thought they were going to see. This was made possible by inserting a misleading frame in the middle of the movie, which was presented automatically as being the thumbnail. This soon came to be common knowledge amongst the YouTube community. Another variation on this is placing a frame of a woman’s cleavage in the middle of the video (often in combination with a misleading title). The account ‘AtheneWins’ is infamous for successfully drawing attention to their videos about net-neutrality this way.
Another less specific aspect that leads to irritation on YouTube is spam in general, both amongst videos as well as in the comments section. Although the term ‘spam’ is often used as an umbrella term for all the flagging issues, the videos/ comments addressing the issue of spam reveal the same critique as the videos/ comments about misleading thumbnails. By making videos and leaving comments about these seemingly small details in the system and on the platform, they collectively show they care about the YouTube platform, wanting to improve it and that they regard themselves as being part of the community.
The Self-Righteous One
These accounts mainly accuse YouTube and/ or the community of withholding them from their right of free speech, regardless of the subject matter. The videos often have the words ‘falsely flagged’ in the title or in the description text. They are defending their own videos or those of other Tubers and mirroring their videos . Mirroring is the practice of uploading the flagged video under other multiple accounts, by the same and/or other users. This way it gets spread over YouTube in various directions and makes it hard for flaggers to trace them all down. These videos and the practice of mirroring form another example of the self-reflexive nature that exists on YouTube. Entire accounts and playlists are dedicated serve as mirror account and/or contain videos about flagged videos, banned accounts and notorious flaggers. The underlying motivation is to prevent someone else from telling the community what they can and cannot put online and is in that sense a critique towards moderation in general. This often involves taking on the role of the victim, by doing so showing the same characteristics as trolls/trolling have:
“All are rooted in one psychological insight: If you simply ban trolls – kicking them off your board – you nurture their curdled sense of being the oppressed truthspeaker.”
Looking at the videos they’re defending, often these are not the most world changing videos. This leads to think that it’s not that specific video or argument they are defending, but they’re either defending free speech in general and/or showing their support (by mirroring that video or posting a video response) to a certain side of a specific discussion. For example, accounts showing their support or mirroring videos from either account ‘VenomFangX’ or ‘Thunderf00t’ are actually supporting either creationism or the evolution theory. And can be seen as having the reversed effect of flagging: keeping a video online and the discussion that surrounds it alive. Another way of interpreting the fact that the debate is not about one video in particular, is by comparing it to the way Jenkins describes the role of gossip:
The specific content of gossip is often less important than the social ties created through the exchange of secrets between participants. (Jenkins, 2006, p.84)
Defending certain videos, users and opinions towards the community builds common ground between the users and thereby a stronger sense of community. This is beneficial towards YouTube, until discontent rises to the point that users are abandoning the platform.
Until that point, it is in YouTube’s advantage to stay out of these discussions, even though a lot of users are addressing them to solve the problem.
The Ego-Flaggger
Some flaggers brag about which accounts they got deleted and dedicate movies and channels to this fact. Revealing a sense of power play that is caused by flagging a video; exhibiting the influence a user has by getting someone else’s video removed from the site. An illustrational example would be Iflagwweuploadersv3’s movies. All of which are two or three sentences in basic white typography on a blue background with titles like “Bye Bye Emilking943”, “Notice from I flag wwe uploaders” and “MY real Backup account”. The use of backup accounts is something that is both used by accounts that are repeatedly flagged (see strategy from testcase) as well as by accounts that are engaged in group flagging practices (see flagging campains). With the difference that the first group uses it as something to fall back on in case their main account gets closed down, while the second group uses their other accounts as sockpuppets for flagging purposes and close them down afterwards themselves.
Trollers, flamers & spammers
These three types of users can be found on different types of platforms and aren’t YouTube specific. A troller is generally the one “who baits and provokes other group members, often with the result of drawing them into a fruitless argument and diverting attention from the stated purposes of the group.” A flamer sends out messages “intended to insult, provoke or rebuke”. “[Trolling] differs from flaming in that the goal of the flame bait is to incite any and all readers, whereas the goal of a stereotypical troll is to draw in particularly naive or vulnerable readers.” The common opinion on the Internet is that these types of users need to be ignored, which can be summed up in the advice: “stop feeding the trolls.”
Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, but the pig likes it.
An interesting trend of spamming has sprung up amongst the YouTube community to make videos by the name “This Video Will Be Flagged.” This form of spam is known under the name “YouTube poop”, these clips consist of repeated sequences of mostly cartoons, from which the editor has taken a few frames and repeated it. Resulting in videos where words like ‘fuck’ and ’sex’ are endlessly repeated. In the text column they challenge the ‘flaggers’ to flag the video, often referring to them as ‘flaggots’ or ‘fl@ggots’. A related trend is to insert “Flag This” in the video title, or even “Flag this, YouTube!” This could be interpreted as being a direct critique against flaggers, the flagging system and YouTube itself.
Due to these different types of users and emotions that are at play in the discussion of flagging videos and flagged videos, the odds are high enough to say that probably a lot of users are right in saying their video was falsely flagged. Because for many users it’s not about attacking one specific video or user, but taking part in a certain discussion. And flagging is one of the tools they have to do so. Which raises the same question that Benkler asks in his ‘Wealth of Networks’: “who will play the watchdog function?” (Benkler, 2006, p.261) The effects of leaving the question of what is right and what is wrong up to the community would be downplayed if the role of the ‘watchdog’ would be in the hands of the community. To take the role of community serious, it would mean for them to monitor each other’s activities. Which means that they will be their own ‘watchdog’.