Fake animal rescue videos have become a new frontier for animal abuse
nationalgeographic.com
nationalgeographic.com
I spent a lot of time thinking about the platform as a whole after this, about all of the both wonderful and terrible changes it causes for our world. Some sections of YouTube are not just equivalent to television, but much worse and clearly actively harmful, but other sections are so amazing (educational content being one of the best examples imo) that it would be far too careless to dismiss the platform or its incentives as inherently bad.
I suppose the best we could hope for is that we find some ways to improve the viral algorithms (and incentive structures that produce them) that control our Internet ecosystem over time, because there are better ways to align incentives with the goals of humanity than we are currently doing, even if it is hard to get there. I often find that society actually does really care about and improve on these issues, but the reason why it is often easier to be pessimistic is because the changes that we make in response often occur very slowly, often over the span of decades even.
The people who make it have only profit to consider, and the recommendation system gets them more profit.
You can get good recommendation, but you have to let YouTube track you, if you are the kind with no account and block every tracker, you will get the stuff that is the most generic and gets the most clicks, because that's the default. It is good if you want to do a sociological study, but it is unlikely to match your tastes because the algorithm doesn't know your tastes.
I guess that if you really don't like the YouTube recommendation system, you can add a few rules to your favorite ad blocker, the tag ids are not obfuscated.
This doesn't make any sense. The recommendation system that exists right now will only tell you to keep watching more of things you already watch. YouTube already works without a recommendation system. Recommendations by YouTube are the source of... very little that I watch there. You watch things because you already know what you want and search for it, or because you got a recommendation from something other than the YouTube recommendations.
You are getting more of what you are interested in, but you get even less diversity. You are less likely to binge watch useless stuff, but it makes it harder to get more content about the topic you are interested in. Less platform independence, but worse integration.
Things become even more complex when you consider monetization. Obviously, YouTube does that for money, but more money for YouTube also means more money for creators. And if you begin to take into account alternative revenue streams (Patreon, sponsors, ...), you get even more tradeoffs. In any case, YouTube needs money, and it is not that profitable (I think it started at a loss).
As for searching, search is recommendation, unless you know the exact title of your video. For example, if you are looking for "how to install a graphics card", YouTube (or Google, or Bing) will make a small selection of the thousands of videos on the subject.
Not necessarily though - I can think of plenty of partially ad-supported media and publications that have retained their reputation for quality for decades or even centuries, for example, The Economist and the BBC World Service News channel.
...the thing is that the aforementioned don't generally run mass-market ads: the kinds of ads you see in the Economist or in-between World Service news segments is stuff like Rolex watches, Credit Suisse, and Chase Private Client Banking.
One is a subscription service, meaning they aren't reliant on their advertising for most of the finances.
The other is a quasi-govt entity, whose funding comes substantially from a tv license fee.
People subscribe to reality TV channels and plenty of guilty pleasures. OnlyFans is booming and so forth.
You may be correct, but I would love to see anything besides our wishful thinking that this would necessarily breed better content.
this. I'm pretty sure current incentives from an era of capitalist (based on industrial manufacture) are just not good at software and digital goods in general.
However, the exclusive ownership paradigm is so ingrained in our civilization that it'll take a long time for humanity to even properly consider other possibilities.
I think when you see one of these obviously-fake video thumbnails and think to yourself "who in their right mind would click on that?" the answer is usually: children. Millions and millions of children.
There are dozens of channels specifically based around torturing baby monkeys - either pretending to save it from a dog (after filming it being bitten and shaken in the dogs mouth for several minutes), or putting it through other forms of abuse under the guise of "looking after" it. There are people/groups trying to fight against this[0], but YouTube has ignored them for years.
But it even gets worse than that - a second "revenue stream" for these people involves private facebook groups full of people who enjoy watching baby monkeys getting tortured and killed, and will pay people to have them record videos of it.[1][2][3]
[0] Recent petition that I just found via Google, but there are many groups trying to bring attention to this: https://www.change.org/p/youtube-make-youtube-stop-all-anima...
[1] https://www.ccn.com/youtube-has-a-vile-monkey-torture-commun...
[2] NSFL: https://twitter.com/protect_wldlife/status/14243019790446141...
[3] https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/14032495/youtube-baby-monkeys-...
But I’m not a big social media user, so maybe it’s normal to immediately record anything out of the ordinary?
It does does seem to be fairly normal today. I once witnessed a woman struck by a car on a busy street. It was shocking to see how many people had their phones out and were filming the poor woman on the ground. There was thankfully some people trying to contact an ambulance and assist her.
Likewise I'm always amazed how many videos there are on the news from kids in locked down classrooms during school shootings. It's a different situation obviously since they're filming their own suffering as opposed to someone else's but it's still surprising to me.
But at the end of the day it really does not matter. If youve been desensitized to it in your life as a nonwesterner, who are we to demand they change their culture?
I don't know why you're assuming that sea creatures don't suffer. There may be a miscommunication here.
> who are we to demand they change their culture
Would you apply the same reasoning to a culture that practices human sacrifice, for example? Or that enslaves humans? The "it's their (personal) choice" argument breaks down when you realise that the preferences/interests of the victims matter too. Their suffering matters.
Either one of two scenarios exist, we either deem particular cultures invalid (thusly also deeming traditional customs, religion, and experiences as invalid), or we coexist with things we do not like. Either way someone will suffer. But god forbid a westerner be told their ways are bad...
You don't seem to care at all about the victims. If we believe that there is a high probability that a particular country is causing a lot of unnecessary suffering, and we're quite sure we can decrease that amount of suffering with few negative externalities, then to not do so would be violating our own ethical systems - you're effectively arguing that your own ethical system is broken, or has a very special case where it doesn't apply (i.e. whenever an international border is involved). We can argue about how effective these international efforts would be, or have historically been, but that's it's own debate.
Do you think it'd have been wrong to donate to charities which help the Rohingya during the recent genocide of their people? I guess not, because we'd be interfering with another country and that is "bigotry to the maximum degree"? What about for the Tutsis during the Rwandan genocide?
As unfashionable as it is to say, some cultures absolutely are better than others along certain dimensions, and part of an existence in a global/international community is learning from one another, just like individual humans learn from one another in local communities. This is the only reason we talk about improving aspects of our culture in the first place - it's why we discuss things like rape culture, toxic masculinity, women's rights, racism, and so on. Cultures can become different and better.
I think you're imagining some sort of violent military invasion to stop Japanese people eating sea creatures alive, but no one is suggesting anything of that sort.
It's tempting to think in simple extremes like "Countries should never interfere with the affairs of other countries," but effective policies in our messy reality are rarely so simple. If you need help seeing that, try to imagine a really extreme case, like multiplying the suffering during the WW2 Jewish genocide by 1000x, or something like that. Would you interfere? Or just let it play out so they can learn their own lessons?
I love how you're painting me as some sort of pro genocide person simply because I imply that events in motion are something we shouldn't stop just because we believe we're morally superior. Mind your own damn business for once. We're not the fucking world police. Western ideology is not a religion we're supposed to impose on others. Islam is as fucking barbaric as religion gets on a grand scale yet evolutionary the religion has made people successful. So who the hell are we to tell people they can't participate? What cause we have a higher sense of value on the human being? Human life is not valuable just because you have consciousness. You're another blip on the unknown radar that can easily be gone in a moments notice. Everybody every day lives a dice roll of luck and opportunity. Every now and then people lose. Thinking we hold the keys to moral superiority is not going to change that. Is a life as a slave for a shitty lord somehow better than death by genocide? I don't think so. Yet here we are, in areas of the middle east where this is common.
It's the same way you can tell a video is from tiktok even if the watermark is removed.
and yet youtube keeps recommending and encouraging these kind of channels.
"the dodo" has a video of an abused dog out there (that i am not going to link to) that has made countless of views since it came out and is still making views.
replace dog with child and that video would have gotten taken down.
That said, if there is a possibility that the footage has been produced by intentionally harming an animal then it should obviously be taken down - and that's what the linked article is about.
I keep explicitly telling Youtube that no, I am not interested in watching Shark Tank videos. And yet... they keep recommending them to me. The videos probably have very high engagement so it basically doesn't matter if I want to watch them or not, Youtube is going to keep pestering me until I click. I never click, but it's still annoying.
even “yellow journalism” newspapers in the past or tabloids are the same thing.
and algorithms make it more possible at scale but aren’t what’s causing the issue either
Sounds a lot less obnoxious than most.
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Get fucked. Good thing reader view works.