A YouTube video of alleged gang rape was viewed 600 times before being removed from the site. The clip was cited in a report by the House of Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, drawing attention to the argument surrounding the “dark side” of digital companies and the need to vet content on social networking websites such as YouTube.

Of course, children should not be exposed to such offensive content and, in an ideal world, all videos finding their way on to YouTube and rival social networking sites would be policed.

While the committee has good intentions and is making the right noises to keep concerned parents on side, they are living in a fantasy world. I would like to know how many of them are active users of social networks and whether they realise the vast number of videos that get uploaded each minute: 13 hours of video per minute on YouTube alone, up from ten hours a minute three months ago.

One suggestion has been to preview all videos before they appear on a social network. But the costs and logistics of hiring the thousands of staff required for such a task - particularly for social networks that make no advertising revenue - make this near impossible.

There would also be delays, potentially of days, before videos appeared on the website if they were put through such a rigorous process. So much for the immediacy of the internet.

And what about the so-called freedom of the internet? Will this be lost forever, with every clip that is uploaded to be examined by a corporation or government employee? If videos go through a strict vetting process, then surely the same process should be applied to the world of blogs, many of which are also looked at by impressionable young people.

The select committee recommended the establishment of a self-regulatory body to create better online safeguards for children. Such an organisation would police websites, adjudicate on complaints and could help to crack down on piracy and illegal file-sharing in Britain. However, considering the rapid growth of these websites, has the committee calculated the potential cost of such a move?

Despite serious breaches - of which the gang rape video is the most notable - social networking websites should not be dismissed as completely irresponsible. In fact, many family-friendly videos get millions of hits, such as 7.2 million hits for Christian the lion which was reunited in Africa with two Australians who bought him as a cub from Harrods in the Sixties, or the best acts on Britain's Got Talent.

It may come as a surprise to some MPs that not all children want to watch gruesome footage and criminal offences. However there is no doubt that sites could do more - such as make the terms and conditions that guide consumers on unacceptable content more prominent, develop better controls to prevent children from accessing it and create one-click mechanisms for users to report offensive video directly to law enforcement and support organisations.

But there is only so much they can do. Already MySpace and Bebo, the social networking websites, employ several hundred people to review images and videos after they have been posted, although, according to the Select Committee report. Bebo says “it is impossible to find all inappropriate content”. YouTube has a response team that takes down material flagged up by users as offensive, usually within the hour.

On the positive side, some videos appearing on social networks that could be deemed offensive have helped to catch criminals. A man from Leeds, for instance, was recently convicted of a number of offences earlier this year after a court watched footage, shown on a social network, of him racing cars at 120mph on a public road and encouraging his viewers to street race while drunk. While there are some measures that need to be taken by social networks, surely the real job is for parents to monitor their children's surfing habits.

— Energetic efforts

The public relations machines of Britain's biggest energy companies have been hard at work in the past week. The PR teams at rival companies have used a different approaches to release bad news. EDF waited until the end of last week to send out a press release about a rise in energy prices, possibly hoping it would not be noticed before the weekend.

The order in which Centrica's PR team this week put out a succession of announcements appeared an attempt to make the bad news easier to swallow for both customers and investors. On Wednesday, Centrica announced an increase in gas prices of up to 44 per cent. This was clearly strategically timed to be released a day before yesterday's announcement that profits had fallen 20 per cent - a clear move to justify the price rise to customers and the profits fall to investors.

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