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posted by cmn32480 on Friday August 28 2015, @08:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the and-they-are-annoying-too dept.

UK politicians and have urged Twitter and Facebook to change the default behavior of autoplaying videos following the spread of footage showing the shooting of a WDBJ-TV reporter and cameraman:

MPs have called on Twitter and Facebook to take action after many users were confronted with autoplaying videos of the murder of a US TV news crew. The footage was suspected to have been posted by the murderer on Wednesday. Because the sites have set video to play automatically by default, many people saw the video without choosing to when it was shared into their feeds.

A parliamentary group said the firms should ensure that users are warned about graphic content before it plays. The chair of the cross-party Parliamentary Internet, Communications and Technology Forum (Pictfor) said that both social media sites should automatically sift for such content. "Facebook, Google, Microsoft and others have already worked together with government and regulators to prevent people being exposed to illegal, extremist content, using both automatic and manual techniques to identify footage. Social media, just like traditional media, should consider how shocking other content can be, and make sure consumers are warned appropriately," Matt Warman told the BBC.

The Conservative MP for Boston and Skegness added: "For victims, friends and families it's important to make sure that, in an online world without a watershed, users know what they're about to see and have a reasonable opportunity to stop it." He said that, while users can change their own settings to stop videos auto-playing, Facebook and Twitter "need to be aware that one size does not fit all". He said: "Many people who are ordinarily happy that videos play will have seen shocking footage by accident, without warning of its graphic nature."


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28 2015, @09:03AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28 2015, @09:03AM (#228901)

    Blame the browser. Click to play has been available for Flash for years now, but as we finally ditch Flash for HTml5, click to play is still missing. Firefox has it coming up for Firefox 41, but whether or not it works remains to be seen (The setting has been in about:config for a long time but not working). The other browsers seem to be more pro-advertising (Google runs an advertising network, Microsoft seems to be trying to surpass the NSA,...) so I'm guessing not much hope there.

    Click to play is the reason I still use Flash to watch Youtube. When using a tabbed browser, autoplaying videos are just terrible (ok, I have three people talking at the same time, now which three tabs do I need to pause?)

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28 2015, @09:14AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28 2015, @09:14AM (#228905)

    > Click to play is the reason I still use Flash to watch Youtube.

    I disable javascript on youtube and don't get autoplay with html5 either.

    But I also use VLC for all my youtube playback because the user-interface is so much more capable - especially for talking head videos which I can play at around 1.5x speed to be less boring.

    Just drag-and-drop the youtube URL into VLC and it automagically works. Or you can use this add-on. [mozilla.org]

    • (Score: 2) by jdavidb on Friday August 28 2015, @03:21PM

      by jdavidb (5690) on Friday August 28 2015, @03:21PM (#229020) Homepage Journal

      Just drag-and-drop the youtube URL into VLC and it automagically works

      Thank you! I've been using a plugin to download Youtube videos and then play them in VLC for a couple years now. I had no idea how much easier it could be.

      --
      ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2015, @02:40AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2015, @02:40AM (#229302)

        Only ones it won't work for are those with DRM. There might also be a problem with age-verification videos - in the past they worked transparently but just last week I had one that wouldn't play in VLC. But I didn't investigate the details at all. Whenever I get a problem video, I just point youtube-dl [github.io] at it - which bypasses all the DRM crap - and play the file from disk. A total no brainer.

  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday August 28 2015, @09:25AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 28 2015, @09:25AM (#228908) Journal

    Firefox has it coming up for Firefox 41

    ??? Is this a chapter from the "emacs for emacs" saga?

    --
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    • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday August 28 2015, @04:35PM

      by tangomargarine (667) on Friday August 28 2015, @04:35PM (#229060)

      Come again?

      --
      "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
  • (Score: 4, Informative) by inertnet on Friday August 28 2015, @09:59AM

    by inertnet (4071) on Friday August 28 2015, @09:59AM (#228920) Journal

    I don't need a solution for autoplay, but I absolutely hate the "up next autoplay" from Youtube, BBC and others. I found a simple Greasemonkey script to get rid of the "up next autoplay" in Youtube: https://gist.github.com/Yonezpt/51adf278a24488f75ff0 [github.com]

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by SomeGuy on Friday August 28 2015, @04:44PM

      by SomeGuy (5632) on Friday August 28 2015, @04:44PM (#229063)

      Youtube's autoplaying of recommended/next videos blows my mind. I had posted a couple of videos ages ago, and when testing my videos recently using a fresh browser, I was shocked that after the video finished, it automatically started playing a particular video that had content I strongly objected to.

      Individuals can change this behavior on their machine, but there is no way to prevent random new viewers from seeing these. I certainly won't be using youtube for any more videos unless they stop this behavior.

      I'd imagine that out there right now there is some child watching a youtube video full of fluffy bunnies or whatever, immediately followed by some reporters getting shot, or the goat guy, or anything else the uploader did not intend.