YouTube's Fake Animal Rescue Ring [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
Yes, everything is fake on YT, just like everything was fake on TV.
Fake Cake Youtube empire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfpjlxgJMMc
Fake food clickbait https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSBSzWmjXO0
Fake NASA engineer glitter bomb clickbait https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/21/glitter-bomb-video-was-parti...
Fake parkour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9UbIynGdsQ
Fake electric trucks ;-) https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/315151-electric-vehicle-...
Fake speed records https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N22JfNHiC1k
Critical thinking should be taught in school :/
It's a sad world- it almost makes me regret creating the internet and inventing services like youtube and email and HN.
Similar with kids content, there was a scandal a while back about this...
If you have a mouse problem, stick to spring traps which kill them instantly, without prolonged suffering.
See https://www.wikihow.com/Remove-a-Live-Mouse-from-a-Sticky-Tr... for example.
OPs submission seems to link to a YT'r that is demonstrating a welcome dose of critical thinking. There are actually quite a few "critical thinking" YT channels that are worth checking out:
ex:
SolarSands on Liminal Spaces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_dRqMDgdp8
Nightmare Masterclass's "More Human Than Human" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcQk3qM3Ok0
Nightmind on Found Footage videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muVeWfeHfTA
Note that I'm not particularly agreeing with the presumptions/premises/conclusions of these channels. Just showing some optimism that someone out there is flexing their critical thinking skills and drawing quite the crowd.
Is because people is "liking" this kind of content? To "like", you do it under a certain criteria. This criteria should exclude "shady" content under the knowledge that paying attention to the content means "to feed it". This can be taught but it's not.
By law of large numbers even if you educate 95% of the population how to notice when something's not right, an exploiter like this can still just keep getting views from the other 5%.
And the channel in question was in Vietnam, very likely views were coming from all parts of the world. It's not like adding critical thinking to US school curriculum could have stopped this anyway
EDIT: Rereading your comment I realize you were talking about how this gets shared at all and the algorithm that's used to make these videos recommended. My guess is that the channel had a couple dozen or hundred subscribers, and they maybe did some advertising on r/aww or something similar. I don't think it would be hard to get the numbers they were getting even if YouTube wasn't recommending these videos to anyone at all
everything is fake on YT, just like everything was fake on TV.
I need someone with some expert critical thinking skills to explain to me why people are so surprised by these "revelations" of overblown, sensational claims...
At some point, people need to take some responsibility in themselves of being ridiculously gullible and reward blatant cons (Theranos anyone?). There's a weird culture of "It's not my fault I was fooled". Yes, it is. This is literally why we're all taught "history". See the past faults, mistakes, success, good, bad, failures, cons, promises, etc. and understand that it can all happen again. Thus, you can protect yourself. Yet, people keep trying to over complicate that concept.
We are in the age of people so desperate to be apart of a "special group", they're willing to destroy everything around them. Both metaphorically and literally. What's worse, it's "okay" to do so. Folks bought into the life hacks, saving the planet staged videos because they want to so they can feel special doing their upvote. How do you stop it?
In this analogy, our brains are servers and bad actors were stealing our attention.
Thoughts?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY_NtO7SIrY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PGm8LslEb4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-1RhQ1uuQ4
The actual social media platforms saying it's happening.
At the same time though, it's not all their fault. It takes two to tango and if you're gullible enough to wreck your own life on the words of someone you've never, and will never meet... that's a special kind of stupid.
Here's my hope. All of this gets out of our systems. After whoever wins this election, folks are going to go, "Hold on, we're all acting like crazy people. Let's be sensible and stop going to the extremes and work together." This is the fantasy that fills my dreams. Not flying, being rich or anything like that. That, society being sensible and taking some personal responsibility. That's my crazy, wild fantasy...
Is it bad that I have a easier time believing that I would spontaneously develop the combined superpowers of both Superman and Batman than that society would develop the ability to make sensible and responsible decisions about topics that sociopaths and memetic diseases are attempting to subvert?
Wow. Those were rough.
TLDR: Barn, horses, open door, darn.
Social media created the problem, makes enormous profits, harms all of society, and is not only powerless to mitigate it, has no responsibility to do so. Because Freedom Speeches™, or reasons.
You attribute most of the blame on stupid users. And yet. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey retweeted a bot. https://youtu.be/V-1RhQ1uuQ4?t=1159 So then what hope does the average person have of doing better? (Rhetorical question.)
A la Merchants of Doubt, I've always wandered how skeptics, shills, and apologists sleep at night. Surely Sandberg, Zuck, Dorsey, et al somehow manage. But what about the drones? So I'll be watching the career arcs of the people interviewed (Del Harvey, Yoel Roth, Renee DiResta, others) to see where they land.
--
Back to my own quarter baked idea, the "mitigations" explained via Smarter Every Day operate at the medium layer. And they have a conflict of interest. I'm wondering if there's something to protect individuals, a way for noobs to up armor ourselves. My first notion is something akin to iOS Screen Time, like a uBlock for The Outrage Machine, where your device can help you ward off manipulation (inauthentic nudges).
> Fake Cake Youtube empire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfpjlxgJMMc
So I watched that video. It makes a few claims of relevance to the description "fake":
1. The videos show plausible cakes and their contents do not need to be debunked.
2. The channel is owned -- openly -- by what you might consider a conglomerate which operates about 100 youtube channels.
3. This conglomerate's website is copied from a web theme example.
4. Their various channels offer videos which appear, based on review of the thumbnails, to be repeated across several channels. This contradicts a written policy of YouTube, but not the actual policy. (Which, as stated officially but not publicly by YouTube, allows you to repeat content across multiple channels if you are the owner of the content.)
5. On closer inspection, several videos on each individual channel also appear, based on review of the thumbnails, to be repeats.
6. On even closer inspection, the contents of a video on one of these channels do not appear to be related to the video's thumbnail.
7. The conglomerate lists an address in Vietnam. If you look up that address, you can find a building displaying the corporate logo, and they have videos of themselves unboxing the many celebratory buttons they get from YouTube for having so many subscribers.
So summing up:
A. The video content is not deceptive.
B. The people behind the videos operate quite openly and can be found at the location where they say they are.
C. They comply with YouTube's policies on content repetition, despite some unfortunate wording in YouTube's public statement of the policy.
D. It is not even obvious that they are repeating content.
E. They definitely do use deceptive thumbnails.
Why are we calling this "fake"?
"I'd seen this raccoon around the house for a while, had been feeding him, and had been filming his exploits for a while. But one day, he got caught in {extremely picturesque situation} and I knew something had to be done. So I called up these other people to help rescue him, and he was so cute when we fetched him!" (Real rescued animals, BTW, are often injured in ways that will make most people vomit.) "So we took him in to our facility, where he had numerous cute interactions with our other animals..." (real rescued animals are often quite distrusting; there's a couple of other videos where the main storyline was "and he instantly trusted us after a bit") "... and after we released him he still hangs around and visits us for treats and rollicking fun!"
Especially all the bits from before the injury are just crazy. This is a story line from a kid's book, not something that happens routinely. Maybe in the entire ~2 summers my wife worked at a rescue facility you could get one story of this level of "interest" out of it. You could get quite a few of lower levels of "interest", but not this sort of long-running sustained level of interest, and certainly not over and over, every week or on some other regular posting schedule. It was all just too pat to be something happening like this all the time.
The YouTube guy who is amped up about everything, the latest movie is the worst ever, here are some videos of me overreacting to myself on video that I've seen before because I edited them but now I'll act like I didn't, everything celeb gossip type content, even videos reposed with slightly altered origin stories to fit a narrative....
It's all so skewed and wild it's just normal....
Kinda like on Twitter, people rarely just call anyone out for being what would qualify as a jerk IRL... because being a jerk on Twitter really isn't that weird.
I agree, and it it reminds me of a very good article:
https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-ubiquitous-matrix-o...
Will confirm, we have a feral cat living in the garden. We have provided it with shelter (a cat kennel at the top of the garden) he will use during bad weather, we provide him food so he isn’t reliant on hunting and the little bugger will often take a swipe at me while I’m giving him his food. It’s not like I’m cornering him with, he comes running over to me now expecting me to have food.
I find it a bit funny because he still doesn't fully trust me, so while he will come running over to me while I'm putting his food out he will hiss at me while running over to me. It was only a couple months ago I would have to put the food out and return indoors before he would walk over to it and have something to eat.
Little steps I guess.
On one side, we have an extremely manipulative individual/group of people.
On the other we have gullible users, some of which are enabling this abuse by donating money and or sharing this content to other people.
Then in the middle of this sandwich we have the platforms, taking their cut.
I've seen other cases like this but on facebook with conjured sob stories that led to justgiving pages.
Not sure what the solution is apart from relying on good samaritans and people looking out for this bad behaviour.
However I can't remember who said it, but someone said "good people don't scale well on the internet"
There's a generation growing up that doesn't take anything at face value. I wonder what the second order effects of this will be?
Folks in management routinely filter messages. What surprises me more is that you are aware that your developers don't believe you.
It has to be edited by paid employees, legally sound and maintained. wikipedia doesnt cut it.
People are actively darkening their own worldviews by arguing themselves out of good knowledge and swimming into fake news for the thrill of victory. Heady aggression is killing our ability to hold rational positions, when they start misquoting fifteen studies and claiming the 'truth' is whatever they want to know.
it's more like they pick what to take at face value...
I wish, my son came to me recently to tell me about how he is gonna get free robux on Roblox because someone on Roblox told him to do it.
Like in every other way I watch him and he's safe and smart but the moment humans hear a thing they want to be true ... out the window goes good choices.
There were a series of stories about how "this generation can spot fake news better than the last" that seemed encouraging ... but if you looked closer, the "this generation" was still really bad at it ...
He's learning, that's a valuable lesson.
I don't believe this event alone supports the conclusion you try to make:
> the moment humans hear a thing they want to be true ... out the window goes good choices
[0] correction: Kurdish, not Arab.
Stuff like this has happened before, I remember a year or two ago on Twitter there was someone who was friends with someone on the moderation team at Twitter and got them to shut down anyone tweeting anything negative about them, I can't remember the details at the moment. Or years ago on Reddit you couldn't criticize a certain moderator that had a friend who was an admin for the site.
Or more plausibly and less conspiracy-esque, a company like YouTube will eventually come up with a formula like:
threshold=1.5
if hassle(topic) / threshold > revenue(topic):
ban(topic)
All for a topic that's hard to monetize, easier just to ban it and move on.
[0]: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/bbc-david-attenborough-...
I absolutely get how some people's first reaction is to take the easy way and reach for a wallet. After all, the need is there and there seem to be people who seem to be helping. It does help that I don't have that much money to spare so when I donate, it is usually time and not money.
Frankly, I was trying to convince wife to create a dog sanctuary for a while.
Still, while there is special place in hell for some of animal abusers, the middlemen and scammers have their own little ring in there too.
Where do good people scale well? Hollywood, news, DC, politics, military, wall street, etc?
For backstory I found a dog way out in the countryside and clipped together the videos I had sent my wife when I had found and picked up the dog. I wound up posting it to my local subreddit to try to get the dog adopted and it went viral from there. Within 24 hours I licensed the video for a mid 4 figure sum to an agency.
* One of his videos, probably by one of the other guy, went viral and started getting them subscribers.
* They found that they could run ads on such content and get positive ROI due to the viral nature of this content.
* They started churning up more channels, because any single channel has the risk of getting banned. They probably have had other channels that got banned. That is pretty much the only reason he has multiple channels, otherwise of course it's better for 1 channel to have more content.
* The channel that got verified probably got verified only because they added the disclaimer that these are animal actors there, otherwise this content would not have been allowed by YouTube at all. They seeded that channel with safer videos, got verification, then started being more degenerate with the content. After being verified once, the channel is not really checked.
* They reused the description because they're not the best at English; and they reused animals because they probably were able to find a limited number of them. Both being quite stupid mistakes that they now would have erased thanks to this video.
1k American views = $3-5 revenue from ads; I haven't done the math but they could be making $500-2000/week. That's more than enough to live in Vietnam, where these animals are culturally part of their diet. Vietnam also has a culture of "MMO" i.e. "make money online" and has rich forums discussing YouTube ranking techniques, advertising and seo tricks, etc.
The sad part is, these channels will probably be deleted but they'll be back within 1-2mo with new channels.
Source: My company does a lot of YouTube and internet marketing; I previously had hired Vietnamese marketers, designers, and devs; and I've been there.
> YouTube has now age restricted this video... unbelievable. Three painstaking videos diving into this issue, and in the end I'm the one who gets punished. I'm absolutely devastated
YouTube, once again a tool for abusers -- why am I not surprised?
The sad thing is that the perpetrators of this cruelty were probably driven to it through poverty.
The solution that I naturally think of is to pressure YouTube to turn off monetization for videos depicting cruelty, genuine or not.
This is something they have the resources to do and we could make it expensive for them not to do it through public perception.
Are there better solutions we can apply to disincentivize this kind of cruelty?
I'm taking the personal decision to stop watching all animal rescue videos, even the good ones.
To channels promoting other types of animal videos with sappy stories for sobs and glory, you keep doing your thing if you must. At least stop broadcasting rescue videos.
No doubt many of these videos took many attempts (often by children) to get the animal to do something 'funny' and yet painful, sometimes beyond the threshold of what is considered animal abuse, at least in my country. All for a few likes.
Like saying "thousands of 'funny' TikTok videos and iMessage gifs", it seems weird to group TikTok and WhatsApp this way.
WhatsApp's one and only feature is private direct messaging. Basically equivalent to iMessage, SMS, eMail, etc.
edit: Did you mean that this content is being spread maliciously by spammers using WhatsApp?
As an example; the official Valorant Discord server has 200,000 people online right now. Not total; online, actively receiving messages. Some of these private WhatsApps, Discords, etc have tens of thousands of active members, and the content shared goes far, far beyond whatever the title of the channel indicates. The companies behind these isolated social network islands may do some light moderation on the overall server/channel, like not allowing terrorist groups to communicate, but very very rarely do they moderate any deeper; that's left up to the owners of the channel/server, and if they're complicit, it'll never be cleaned up.
Of course, WhatsApp, Discord, Telegram, etc, they don't do discovery. They just let third parties handle that [1]. They get a ton of plausible deniability, which is even further empowered by the push for E2EE.
After AFV started increasing this I just had to stop watching it. YouTube of course has its share of Awful, just like everything else on the Internet.
He has had years of struggles with YouTube censoring and demonetizing his videos. Meanwhile, YouTube is allowing, monetizing, and even verifying these fake animal rescue channels.
It also seems to me that both conservatives and progressives here share a pretty strong paternalistic leanings here
There are plenty of "Primitive Technology" knockoffs too.
Good job @Nick Crowley for exposing this Psychopath
Things like this will go on indefinitely so long as the controversy around fake animal rescues isn't big enough to upset advertisers. I would even go as far as to wager that commenting on these scams probably carries a greater risk of impacted ad revenue. Can't have family-friendly advertising on a channel with a reputation for exposing the dark underbelly of the internet.
I like working in tech, but moments like these really get me down.
Something I could do about it is personally is stop using YT until they do. I've seen other instances of the negatives of YT that are making me think this is what it must come to (i.e. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24571038).
The ironic thing is that I'm tempted not to ban YT because there's so much content that I like (pbs spacetime, veritasium, etc). However this type of reasoning is how atrocities in the past have been allowed to happen. Essentially youtube is Google's real monopoly and this is just another example of the problem of monopolies.
So I'm going to block myself from youtube (since habit is too hard to break, I'll do it by adding these lines to /etc/hosts)
127.0.0.1 youtube.com
127.0.0.1 www.youtube.com
Could someone please post here when these channels are deleted?
BTW I cannot view that link... "This site can’t be reached" :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factitious_disorder_imposed_on...
If people will do it with their own children, doing it with a small animal isn't much of a stretch. I wouldn't be surprised if there are youtube examples of this with a human child victim.
I wonder if this is technically that disorder however, since it seems to be primarily cash-motivated.
> There has been increasing recognition in the pediatric literature for the past 20 years that illness falsification by caregivers must be included in the differential diagnosis of children presenting with persistent, unexplained symptoms or laboratory findings.
dodo animal videos, probably by the same gang.
False, both are for money - you don't need mass exploitation of animals to feed people - as you rightly point out: "there is a lot of unnecessary suffering in the meat industry. However this is a result of producers competing to offer the lowest prices and the consumer buying the lowest price they can find and being unaware of the suffering of the animals."
How is this different from this kind of videos? It's all about consumer buying the product (watching the videos) and being unaware of the suffering of the animals.
Does anyone know the name for this type of fallacy? Not False Dichotomy but similar?