MUSIC VIDEO REGULATION By Ellie Lester

BANNED MUSIC VIDEOS"Just Lose It" by Eminem - Michael Jackson personally called Eminem's representation of him "inappropriate and disrespectful.” As a result Black Entertainment Television banned the video, which at one point depicted Michael with no nose, on a bed with children. While Pee-wee Herman, Vanilla Ice and Madonna are also ridiculed within this video, it was worse for Michael who was fighting child molestation charges at the time. (https://youtu.be/9dcVOmEQzKA) "Born Free" by M.I.A. – A young boy gets shot in the head and another boy is blown to pieces in this video which depicts a redhead genocide. The violence as well as nudity encouraged YouTube to ban the video, though it has since been made available on the site. Thousands of people have debated racist connotations around this video. (https://youtu.be/N6tMRhAi0x0)

WHO IS IN CHARGE OF REGULATING MUSIC VIDEOS?There is an organisation known as the BBFC that controls regulations for music videos which they don’t tend to add age restricting rules unless it contains adult-content. Recently, there was a consultation launched by the government to restrict the sexualisation of children in music videos. The outcome was that the Video Recordings Act should be amended to restrict the likelihood of this sort of content surfacing through media.OFCOM regulate what goes on our TV screen- if people do not like what they are seeing they can complain directly of OFCOM. OFCOM operates under the Communications Act 2003.YouTube can decide whether an artists video is inappropriate for their website. This means that the artist cannot upload it to their official channel, however the video may find its way onto the website through other unofficial channels.

DIFFICULTIES WITH IMPLEMENTING REGULATIONSOnline content can be published freely and anyone can produce explicit content, so this is a clear issue to the BBFC as it’s difficult to stop people from doing this. To fight this, they have been requesting members of the online community to report any content that might be considered as unlawful or explicit.Another problem with implementing regulations is the fact that children can create fake accounts by changing their date of birth when signing up, this allows them to watch any content they want with no restrictions. For example, a 10 year old will still watch a 15 rated video.Age regulations are specifically in place to stop younger children from accessing explicit video’s that would either influence or upset them and it is still questioned today whether YouTube is doing enough to protect children from such viewings. Unfortunately, you can’t always protect them because there are some people who are capable of hacking such systems and websites so that they are able to upload video’s that would not normally be accepted by websites.