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rasz

Same submission with same title month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24610404

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 :/

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Even if critical thinking is taught in school this problem wouldn't be solved. These videos pass by in feeds and people think "that looks cool" or "aww cute" and keep going. They don't open up photoshop and analyze the parallax and object seams. People do not have time nor cause to investigate every video or news item that comes up. Even the investors of Nikola didn't have time to do a full due diligence before investing! Most of this fake-content is largely banal (cakes, speed records) as for the non-banal, platforms need to step up and hinder or stop its spread.

The question is why these videos "pass by in feeds". Is because they are popular? If so, why?

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.

Still puts the onus on the wrong party. The videos in question had 10's of thousands of views but were produced in such large quantity that the sum of all videos was in the millions of views.

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

A lot of the fake content out there (both benign and malicious) is being paid for by "engagement" aka ads. If you remove that revenue stream (or attach liability to it, like the platform being complicit in the animal abuse in this case), you solve a large part of the problem.

Removing money fixes most social problems.

Could a browser plugin do the image analysis, then score the image?

Interesting that you end with a note about critical thinking.

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.

You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?

> You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?

It's a sad world- it almost makes me regret creating the internet and inventing services like youtube and email and HN.

Don't, we're still in the just-discovered-beer-and-dont-know-my-limits stage of things. Better days (and much darker ones too) ahead. :)

I think the point is anything on YouTube is manufactured. It’s not necessarily lies, but people have to be aware when they are watching a video about an electric truck or rescuing animals, the intent wasn’t to do that thing, the intent was to create a video about doing that thing that people will enjoy watching. So while there is an inherit falseness to everything on YouTube, that doesn’t need to imply malignancy.

To add to this, the intent is to add views to the videos. If something sells - and one can see what is trending - video creators jump on the bandwagon and do it. The problem is not only fakeness but inauthenticity.

Similar with kids content, there was a scandal a while back about this...

I think that’s a level of media sophistication that’s hard to instill in people. After all, motion pictures, literature, and art of all kinds produces emotional effects because at some level, people accept what’s presented to them. It takes consistent effort to remember that the thing we’re experiencing is not a naive, straightforward presentation “from nowhere” without any sort of goal, whether innocuous or nefarious.

I am sad none of you guys caught the reference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWdD206eSv0

Fortunately all of those examples don't involve abusing living creatures.

Some of them do. Outside of that video, I've seem one that involved a kitty and a sticky trap built for rats.

A note on those sticky traps - don’t use them. It’s as inhumane to trap a rat/mouse in them as it is to trap a kitty.

If you have a mouse problem, stick to spring traps which kill them instantly, without prolonged suffering.

If you check the traps often, I think they might be better than kill traps. You can take the glued mouse far away in the middle of nowhere and pour vegetable oil on the glue apparently which sets the mouse free. Then the mouse didn’t die and you got rid of the mouse.

See https://www.wikihow.com/Remove-a-Live-Mouse-from-a-Sticky-Tr... for example.

Critical thinking? Is it really critical thinking to understand that people have been dishonest to make money since... oh I don't know... the past few millennia? I know it's a fairly recent concept, but I think it's happened enough to have merit.

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.

What if the "people" is a Russian based content farm injecting political bits into their kid friendly fun hack clickbaity videos? What if that content farm is THE biggest Youtube content creator, beating even pewdiepie? Let me introduce you to TheSoul Publishing. Just one of their channels, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-Minute_Crafts, is 5th most subscribed on the platform, and they run hundreds of them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvqa8dsBtno

Yea... but they dont exist in a vacuum. What can we do about people who are easily fooled by stupid crap? That's a serious question. People keep believing in the dumbest things and defend that to the death. When I was growing up, there were common jokes about the fact politicians will say anything to get a vote. Thus, dont believe any. Suddenly everyone is praising politicians like they're the second coming of Jesus. This is both sides of the aisle. "That politician has my best interests in mind". That's just as stupid as the person who goes, "Hey, you know what, after seeing that sign on the side of the road, I'm going to vote for them."

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?

What if misinformation and trolling is treated like a DDoS? How would we mitigate it?

In this analogy, our brains are servers and bad actors were stealing our attention.

Thoughts?

Yea, that's well known. Not just from federal law enforcement with proof of it, but twitter, youtube and facebook know it and admit to it too. Smarter Everyday interviewed all 3 and their folks talk about this directly.

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...

> This is the fantasy that fills my dreams. Not flying, being rich or anything like that.

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?

Thanks for the links. I hadn't seen those.

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).

It’s not the same kind of fake though. In this kind of fake, animals are abused (and killed). In the ones you posted as examples that it’s not a big deal and you should use your judgement, no animal or people are hurt or abused.

  everything is fake on YT, just like everything was fake on TV.

They're more different than they are the same. There is a different set of incentives, and a different set of constraints with Youtube producers than there was in television.

> Yes, everything is fake on YT, just like everything was fake on TV.

> 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"?

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