Younow Young Girl
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Younow Young Girl
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For a young child, in the safety of her own house and her own room, the adoration of strangers can hold strong allure, and the unknown people at the other end of the internet might not seem real. But the risks being faced and the risks being taken are very real.
Jul 21, 2014, 07:22 PM EDT | Updated Sep 20, 2014
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An 11-year-old girl lies on the floor of her bedroom. On the desk behind her is a trophy that clearly identifies her name, her hometown, and the school she attends. She stares at her computer and responds to questions on the screen with a winning sincerity. 'Do you dance?', 'Yes, badly'. 'Do you have a bf (boyfriend)?', 'No, what for?' She appears to be video-chatting and is comfortable enough to be doing it in a loose t-shirt and pajama shorts.
What's wrong with this picture? Mainly the fact that the girl has no idea who is on the other end of her Internet connection. For example, she has no idea who I am but I am looking into her bedroom watching her answer increasingly personal questions from more than a hundred other anonymous viewers.
YouNow.com is a website self-professed to provide 'the best way to broadcast live and get an audience to watch you.' At any given moment there are hundreds of live video feeds and watching them requires no registration, age verification, or identification of any sort. Viewers communicate with the broadcaster through written comments. Broadcasts are organized under various categories with some of the most popular being 'Dance,' 'Girls.' 'Twerk,' and 'Truth-or-dare.' Broadcasters can earn 'likes' from viewers and accumulate 'fans,' while advancing in 'levels.' But the real competition is for viewers. With so much choice, children do increasingly daring things to avoid losing the attention of their audience.
YouNow lists the behaviors and the content that they consider to be unacceptable. For example, the guidelines prohibit nudity or sexually explicit content, as well as 'grooming and solicitations' which are defined as 'behavior intended to manipulate another member into producing sexual images of themselves, or provide personal information.' Yet girls frequently flash their bras, their breasts or their underwear in response to viewers' incessant demands. When two 10-year-old girls went online to show off their ability to rap, they were soon being asked about the color of their underwear, and encouraged to 'flash' and 'make out together.'
Children are also regularly encouraged by viewers to perform dangerous 'dares' such as the cinnamon challenge (eating a spoonful of cinnamon without drinking -- a behavior that can cause severe choking). Viewers often threaten to leave for another broadcast if the youth do not comply with their requests. One girl choked, gasped and struggled for air after attempting a challenge. Comments reflected the horror of the situation: 'OMG, OMG THAT WAS SO SCARY,' 'THOUGHT YOU WERE GOING TO DIE THERE. ALMOST CALLED 911.' But these comments were soon replaced by others encouraging her to: 'Now do the cinnamon one.'
Other theoretically prohibited but commonly seen behaviors include threats, taunts and insults, profanity, and underage drinking. Out of eight behaviors prohibited by YouNow, the only one that I did not see violated within one hour of viewing the site was copyright infringement -- and I am not sure if it is legal to broadcast copyrighted songs over the site.
Whether YouNow's ineffectual moderation and policing of their website reflects a deliberate choice, or merely the difficulty of supervising hundreds of live streams simultaneously I do not know. What is clear is that their guidelines exist in theory alone.
What is also clear is that many children are inviting the world anonymously into their bedrooms, naively sharing their identity, privacy and intimacy with strangers. YouNow also exits as a smartphone app, enabling children to broadcast from virtually anywhere and negating crucial parental supervision. Prior to writing this post I conducted a completely unscientific poll of colleagues and friends asking if they knew about YouNow. Many of them have children and all of them use social media. None of them had heard of it. When I described it, one horrified parent called it 'pedophile heaven'.
YouNow's style of personal broadcasting represents a new kind of internet peril and it is imperative that awareness among parents grow. Children need to be aware of the risks and to have clear guidelines for safe behavior. When the girls I mentioned earlier were asked about the color of their underwear another viewer told them: "Don't tell him that. That's not funny or cute' and warned them that things would escalate. Their response? 'He doesn't know where we live,' and 'We're just 10! We don't even have anything to show.'
It is also imperative that YouNow take greater responsibility for the risks their website creates. Greater public scrutiny will cause them to take this responsibility seriously. I hope that a serious or tragic event is not needed to trigger this scrutiny.
For a young child, in the safety of her own house and her own room, the adoration of strangers can hold strong allure, and the unknown people at the other end of the internet might not seem real. But the risks being faced and the risks being taken are very real.
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YouNow is the weirdest, most fascinating video streaming site. Unlike Periscope or Meerkat, you can pay a teen while he sings, dances, or even sleeps.
As Meerkat and now Periscope are being touted as a possible future of news, YouNow is the livestreaming video app where teens are flocking. If Meerkat and Periscope are competing for the eyeballs of news junkie adults on Twitter, YouNow has already won with the hordes of young people who just want to hang out with each other.
Lately, I've been enjoying a deeply creepy yet technically totally innocent new activity: lying in bed at night and watching random teens sleep. I've been doing it on YouNow, a mobile app and web live-streaming app that's a hit with teens. On its popular #sleepingsquad hashtag, I can see about 20 sleeping teens at any given time. (It usually seems around 50-plus people are broadcasting in the hashtag, but a lot of them are in complete darkness, so you can't actually see anything. Because, you know, they're sleeping.)
Some teens sleep with light music on. Some are completely silent. And some, eerily, have the distinctive soft breathing sounds of sleep.
I don't know exactly why a teen would broadcast themselves sleeping. I can't ask them.
I have asked other teens (or younger — I talked with kids as young as 10) why they use YouNow , a real-time video broadcasting app. The problem with asking a 13-year-old why they do anything is that it's quite difficult to get anything past "I dunno/I'm bored." But that's also the wrong question to ask. Why climb Mount Everest? Why tweet? Do adults really ever have a better answer than "I was bored" for anything we do? The aching desire to cut through the tedium of daily life with human interaction is the driving force of everything on the internet. In fact, boredom is such an integral raison d'être of teen life that #bored is one of the top channels on YouNow.
I chatted the the other people watching in the #sleepingsquad: Why? One girl watching a sleeping teen boy with me gave a reasonable response: "He's my boyfriend." Others had elliptical reasoning: "I think it's more that the people doing it want to get likes and fans."
Adi Sideman, the founder of YouNow, told me his theory on #sleepingsquad: "It's the addiction to the internet, it's the addiction to social media, it's not wanting to leave it behind even when you're sleeping." Andy Weissman of Union Square Ventures, who is invested in the app, described it as "an online slumber party" in an email to BuzzFeed News. "I also think part of the human condition is to look for connection with others. And this is probably more acute with younger people."
The app is sort of like Vine meets Chat Roulette meets The Gong Show . You can watch people live-streaming in different channels like "Musicians," "Dancing," or "Girls" and chat feedback or questions to them. If you really like them, you can tip them with points purchased with real money through the app, and the performer gets real money as a tip. YouNow's revenue model is based completely around the tipping system; they take a cut of the in-app purchases when fans buy points to tip the performers.
It's basically like an open-mic night where the hat is passed around: Some people will watch for free, some will toss a dollar in, and the house takes a cut at the end of the night. Currently, there are no plans to introduce ads. "We're happy with our current revenue model," said Sideman.
Fandom doesn't have a price on other platforms, like Vine or YouTube, where teen stars are made — ad-supported videos eliminate the need for financial transactions between the watchers and the watched. I asked Sideman why these mostly young users (70% are under 24, according to Sideman) would actually pony up cash to enjoy someone playing an Ed Sheeran cover instead of just enjoying an Ed Sheeran cover for free.
"Most of the fans just enjoy and chat and interact. Some of the fans want to stand out and want to participate more in, really, the content creation," said Sideman. "Because think about it — from a theoretical standpoint this thing is as much about the audience as it is about the broadcast. And that's really our focus — to let everybody participate and create content together. So if I tip or if I send a message and he incorporates it into what he's doing, we're collaborating."
The chat section for these popular YouTube stars moves fast — paying to pin your message to the top gets their attention.
During the day, the #sleepingsquad disappears. Musicians, performers, and cute charming teens dominate. I checked out the kids in the #truthordare channel. This where a distinct knot in my stomach kicked in. These were often young girls, seeming around ages 10–15, who are playing a sexually suggestive game with strangers. Coming up with harmless dares and G-rated truths is tough. So I did a few would-you-rathers instead:
For a dare, I dared the teen girls to lip-synch to a Taylor Swift song of their choosing (A+ dare, FYI. Feel free to use that one). One of them rolled her eyes and said she didn't like Taylor Swift — you could see the teen embarrassment of not wanting to like the thing that her peers liked — and offered to lip-synch instead to a parody of "Blank Space" by the YouTube star Shane Dawson.
Teens, let me give you a word of advice from a cool adult: Liking Shane Dawson is way more embarrassing than liking Taylor Swift.
After I had dared the third girl into singing a T. Swift song, I realized… this is really fun . It was a nostalgic rush to watch these girls lip-synch along to a pop star from inside their bedrooms — an activity that I have done not infrequently myself. It didn't feel creepy or wrong; it reminded me of a fun slumber party, exactly as the venture capitalist Andy Weissman described (though I maintain I am more qualified than him to judge similarities to a teen girl sleepover).
I am thinking very hard back to my teen self, and if this would have appealed to me. I was shy, and I think I wouldn't have liked the performative nature of it, but it's so hard to compare how normalized this technology is to kids now (for comparison, Myspace didn't exist until I was out of college). The kids on YouNow seems to represent the full social map of the lunchroom: theatre kids, hot popular girls, nerds, randos, short show-off-y boys in snapbacks. The difference is between YouNow and the real lunchroom is you can pay to sit at the popular kids' table if you want.
A girl in the "dance" category receives 50 "thumbs up" points from a fan, while a guy streams in the "guys" category.
Undoubtedly, there is something extremely worrisome about the vulnerability of children on the site. Sideman has his own knowledge of the dangers of adult predators. He produced a documentary Chicken Hawk about the notorious NAMBLA (North America Man-Boy Love Association) while in NYU film school in the mid-1990s. It was shown in the New York Underground Film Festival and a write-up in the Los Angeles Times called it "coldly objective" (the film is not at all supportive of NAMBLA). A 2001 article in New York magazine about the New York tech scene mentions him in not entirely flattering terms (the article is an amazing read as a time capsule of the tech bubble; I can't recommend it enough). The the author, Steve Fishman, chronicles his year of trying to get a karaoke website off the ground, and Sideman was involved as a business partner.
"I didn't speak to Steve, who is now a friend, for a few years after that. I was upset he wrote that my loft smelled like beer," he told me, chuckling. Adi, a former Israeli military paratrooper in his forties, wears a tight T-shirt over a henley and jeans and has funky glasses. He's likable and animated and offered me a cocktail at the office. He does not seem like someone whose loft would smell like beer.
Admittedly, as nervous for these kids' safety as I felt, I never saw anything weird or overtly sexual or harmful on YouNow. No one was exploiting the tipping system for stripping, and I didn't observe anyone acting untoward in the chat feature that runs along the side. YouNow employs a team of both in-house and outsourced content moderators.
"We have a large responsibility because it's live and because it's very popular with teens," said Sideman. "We invest a lot in our community management. We invest a lot in trust and safety in multiple languages to make sure that this is a safe place, and I'm very happy to say it is."
The broadcasters themselves didn't seem to worry either.
"Do you worry if there's creepy people on here?" I asked an 11-year-old girl.
"Do your parents know you use this app?"
"Does that matter? No. It doesn't matter. They don't know."
Katie Notopoulos is a senior technology reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York. Contact this reporter at katie@buzzfeed.com.
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