The internet is life changing. Even though I live abroad, I can see my friend’s children growing up through Facebook (or at least get little glimpses), I can ‘meet’ bloggers from Chile, Canada and the United Arab Emirates and find groups of people with similar interests. I can look up things on Wikipedia, read from multiple news sources, write my congressperson, take courses if I want and see chicken porn.
Yeah. Those last two words are pretty much a conversation stopper. I’ve known for years that there is a dark side to the internet; that wars can be funded online, terrorist actions planned and a whole lot of other bad stuff. But knowing it’s out there doesn’t mean I come across it. But violent chicken porn?
One innocent YouTube video of how to round up chickens was followed by another that started out as strange and soon spiraled into the equivalent of a Caucasian man promoting violent rape, using a chicken carcass as the surrogate woman. I won’t give the title, because I don’t want to give this seriously sick person any more attention than his video has already received (the hits are in the millions).
That’s bad enough. But worse is that it was right there in the middle of perfectly innocent videos and unless flagged, would not be blocked by parental controls such as “guided access” or “restrictions.” I flagged the video and asked friends to flag it as well. Perhaps it’s now blocked through parental control apps, but how many more of these sorts of retina burning images are out there? And who’s going to protect ME from them?
This is nothing compared to images of Syrian children, women and men dying from chemical weapon attacks or Egyptians in church on Palm Sunday being blown to pieces by a terrorist attack. These images will always be with me, but these awful deaths captured on film at least bring the world to tears and world leaders to action.
Do I wish I hadn’t seen these images? The part of me that wants to deny the darkness within our species would have preferred not to see this. But the part of me that knows reporters are risking their lives to get the news to us and that wants war crimes and terrorism to come to an end somehow believes that our collective knowledge of such suffering will be a catalyst for change. I unfortunately don’t have any links to support this, but I believe if we all write our governments and tell them that we find these acts unacceptable, we might add pressure to be the change toward peace. One can at least hope this is the case.
These atrocious videos that promote rape on the home front are the types of things we, as a civil society, can certainly fight.
You can take action by flagging inappropriate content on YouTube, to save others from being exposed to this crap. Click here for YouTube’s instructions.
Here are some articles on setting up safety features:
Setting up restrictions on your iPad, iPhone, etcetera.
Setting up safety mode on YouTube.
I plan to continue being a member of the digital world, reading blogs, watching YouTube videos on topics of interest, writing books and blogs, participating in social media channels and watching the news. But I also plan to be more vigilant and do my part to flag inappropriate content and using the internet for connection and positivity.
Ostriches don’t actually hide their heads in the sand. Neither should we.
kristininholland 