A British woman who claims she was gang raped by a group of teenagers in a video published on YouTube has been arrested on suspicion of underage sex and perverting the course of justice.
The 24-year-old woman was arrested on March 28 but released on bail until early May in relation to the "rape", which allegedly occurred in November, British newspapers reported.
Three boys, one 14 and two aged 16, were arrested after the woman reported the incident to police in February but will face no further action, it was reported.
Google, which bought YouTube for $US1.65 billion in 2006, has come under fire from British MPs for failing to take the three-minute video, filmed with a mobile phone, off the site quickly enough. It had already been viewed by 600 times before it was removed.
YouTube does not vet videos before they are published on the site, instead relying on its users to report offensive content.
Kent Walker, the company's vice-president and general counsel, said the video had been flagged as offensive by users but the YouTube moderator "had reviewed a huge number of materials and did not take it down promptly".
He said inappropriate clips were typically removed within an hour.
The British MPs on the culture, media and sport committee had called for YouTube to check content before it was posted, but Walker said this was impractical due to the sheer number of videos uploaded to the site each day.
Founded in 2005, YouTube now accounts for a third of all video viewed on the web. About 10 hours of footage is uploaded to it every minute.
Walker's comments are similar to that made by YouTube co-founder Steve Chen in an interview with smh.com.au last month. He said although he felt uneasy that his video sharing site was frequently used to publish vile clips showing rape, bullying and gratuitous violence, vetting all clips before publication would break the fabric of the site.
"It's an impossible task for us to manually go through and solve this problem through just manual labour," Chen said.
"What we're going to have to do is rely on the millions of eyeballs from the community rather than the hundreds that we have [internally] on the site."
Last year, a video showed a man urinating on a dying woman while yelling, "This is YouTube material!"
Another, published on the site in 2006, appeared to show a gang of 12 Melbourne youths coercing a 17-year-old girl to the Werribee River and assaulting her. The attacks involved the men setting her hair alight three times and urinating on her.
Some groups pointed to YouTube and its ability to create overnight celebrities as actually encouraging such attacks.
