The popular video-sharing sites MySpace and YouTube recently made news for clamping down on nudity and violence. But in their place have come several spin-off sites whose claim to fame is no regulations at all.
One of those sites is called Stickam and allows users to view streaming video of others -- live and unregulated. Donna Rice Hughes, president of Enough is Enough, said Webcasts often come straight from a teenager's bedroom.
"This is very dangerous. It’s actually a predator magnet for sexual predators," she told Family News in Focus. "And they don’t have to go very far to find a vulnerable teen a situation like this and strike up a conversation.
"They are putting kids at great risk by pushing the envelope for their own selfish bottom line, and parents need to be very engaged in what their kids are doing."
Steve Ensley, president of American Family Online, said following the money explains why the video-sharing hosts are operating without regulation.
"It’s just the sheer volume and the sheer lack of conferral and discipline on the part of the people hosting these sites," he explained. "They don’t want to monitor this, they don’t want to prevent anything, because it diminishes ad revenue for them."
With government regulation lacking, Pat Trueman of the Alliance Defense Fund said it's up to parents to guard what comes into the home.
"You have to have some good filtering system," he said. "This is how we protect ourselves. This is how we protect our children."
A couple other envelope-pushing sites to watch out for: Dailymotion and LiveLeak, which is currently featuring footage of grisly Iraq battle scenes.
