Videos on YouTube

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For all of the years I have been seeing videos on YouTube I didn't know about the "Flag" option. Once I found out about this in December last year (2009), I registered onto YouTube and got busy flagging some videos pertaining to epilepsy. For the first two weeks, it looked like some of the videos I flagging were being removed from YouTube. Just not all of them. One of the videos I flagged was removed, but it was later uploaded again. Seeing this, along with some of the videos I flagged not being removed, I realized this wasn't doing any good.

Stigma, prejudice and discrimination is never going to end. Even for those of us who are having to deal with seizures and epilepsy. So instead of trying to fight primarily the stigma, let's just dodge "the negative" and focus our attention on "the positive".

At this moment, the most recently uploaded video onto YouTube that pertains to epilepsy and seizures, dated January 20, 2010, is titled "WARNING! THIS VIDEO MAY CAUSE VIOLENT PROJECTILE VOMITING AND EPILEPTIC SEIZURES!" This is a 31 second video of an animated hot dog with the background colors rapidly changing. The message under the user name bowlingforcheese is "WATCH IF YOU DARE!" I'm definitely willing to flagged this one video, but there's no guarantee this video is going to be removed. And this is just one of those videos intended to insult people with epilepsy. bowlingforcheese is only one of the members on YouTube who's throwing stigma at people trying to cope with epilepsy.

My idea is instead of trying to "catch the stigma and throw it back", just "dodge the stigma" and focus your attention on getting the information about seizures and epilepsy everyone needs to see and understand. I'm talking about everyone, no matter if they do or do not have epilepsy.

Which would you consider as being most important... A) Keeping people from uploading stigmatizing videos about epilepsy onto YouTube; . . . Or . . . B) Making people aware of what can happen with sticking something inside a person's mouth when they're having a seizure? By typing in just the word "epilepsy" (without the quotation marks) in the YouTube search box, and by making a few choices within the additional "Search Options" on YouTube, the following weblink is what shows up, in order to have up-to-the-minute search results. http://www.youtube.com/results?uploaded=d&search_query=epilepsy&search_type=videos&suggested_categories=26%2C22%2C1%2C10%2C25&uni=3&search_sort=video_date_uploaded

This was how I found out about the video of a little baby girl who had a seizure on Christmas day last year (2009). I considered that video as being a wonderful source for learning the correct way to proving proper first aid to a child having a tonic clonic (grand mal) seizure. Here's a weblink for that video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8NmeO-EMfI

Comments

Re: Videos on YouTube

Submitted by NewJersey on Thu, 2010-01-21 - 06:06

People who are interested in this question may also want to look at this thread

http://my.epilepsy.com/discussion/987363 "YouTube Videos of Seizures."

Good points, Spike.

I guess when you put it that way, flagging discriminatory videos on YouTube is not going to end prejudice. It IS more important to educate people not to stick things in our mouths.

But a video called "Important Things to Know When Someone You Love is Having a Seizure" will not have the box-office appeal of one called "Let's Make Jokes about Someone We Don't Know Having a Seizure."

If any one of us, all by ourselves, tried to fight against those discriminatory videos we would probably have the same result you had. A lot of work (thank you for that work, Spike) and not that much to show for it. But if a group of us agreed to keep a running list of objectionable videos and all go flag them, perhaps we could make a difference?

Best wishes from New Jersey