Tocmags How to Roll a Joint Video Incident Seems Suspicious
Posted by Oliver
The recent news that a video featuring detailed instructions on how to “roll a joint” appeared on new mobile content site Tocmag and was promptly downloaded some 5000 odd times, mostly, according to Tocmag, by school-aged children in the UK.
According to a press release from the company:
‘We unreservedly apologise for this oversight and we’re doing everything in our powers to ensure it doesn’t happen again,’ said Tocmag founder Brad Ells. ‘From the outset of this project, we realised illicit content is a serious problem with user-generated material. We have conducted a review of our censorship process and ramped-up the resources we devote to ensuring Tocmag is a clean service.’
The thing about this is that makes me suspicious is that the way popular content appears to come to the forefront on the site. If the company had been using the practices it describes are put in action by their human censors they should have noticed this inappropriate content much earlier and simply rectified the situation.
Secondly their choice to circulate a press release about this “mistake” feels more like a publicity stunt than a genuine apology which could more effectively been delivered to a much smaller group and in the form of a letter rather than to the entire blogosphere.
Call me a cynic but it feels a lot to me like a ploy for media attention rather than a real apology from a company executive who should be more than a little embarrassed. Increasing my suspicion about the “Joint Video” is the fact that the press release includes a contact for interviews and bullet points about the company that are highly promotional in nature.
I don’t know about you, but if my company had just unwittingly provided detailed first hand video information on how to commit an elicit act to thousands of my country’s young people I’d be more inclined to crawl under a stone than offer up interviews and in the same document as the apology (which doesn’t even appear until the sixth paragraph) cite my company’s circulation statistics.
Honestly, I’m not sure which is worse, the idea that this company “concocted” this to generate media attention (hey, they got on MobileCrunch, didn’t they?) or that they have such impaired judgment that they chose to use this serious error as a vehicle to promote their brand.
I sincerely do hope it’s just a lack of judgment and a failure to appreciate the potential harm such a video could cause because the idea that a company would actually stoop to such a level to get additional attention from the media makes me wonder if they also like to cover “happy slapping”.
Please note, that I have not covered Tocmag previously and do not in any way review their service here. This post and any comments I or others may make in regards to what I’ve written should apply only to the “Joint Video” and the way that Tocmag executives have chosen to go about mitigating the damage and providing some means of insuring that such an issue won’t again result in young people being exposed to material or information that is illegal, inappropriate or both.
It’s a further question mark in my mind just how aggressively they are attempting to police the content as a simple cursory viewing of the first gallery page of the site reveals “Hentai porn”, nude or semi-nude women, a fat guy getting his gynocomastic nipples sucked by two young ladies and other assorted less than G-rated content.
Not that I’m some puritanical goody two shoes, personally I don’t care what’s up there, but if your company claims to enforce a particular editorial policy and goes so far as to circulate a press release related to some inappropriate content making it past the censor, then it would make sense that if you are truly applying the previously described standard than little to no other potentially offensive content would be there as opposed to the majority of content failing to be within the stated guidelines.
So, what do you all think? Honest mistake or slick PR Effort/Blogosphere Suicide? I’d love to hear your thoughts…
