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YouTube's Fake Animal Rescue Ring [video]
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- shiftpgdn 6y agoIt makes me so sad to see this. I have one of the first "viral" animal rescue videos on YouTube: https://youtu.be/zfKkihoH3Uk https://youtu.be/zfKkihoH3Uk and one of those channels has a shot for shot recreation of my video. 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.
- stareatgoats 6y agoGood job on the puppy rescue. The larger picture to me is that there is a market for "reality drama" videos, that can pay the lucky videographer mid 4 figure sums. Wasn't aware, but should have known. Not to detract from what you did here, but it explains why people increasingly are whipping out their mobiles when someone (human or animal) is in a life threatening situation nearby, instead of trying to help (or even get out off the way of rescue teams).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mothsonasloth 6y agoThis is absolutely shocking. 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"
- mStreamTeam 6y agoThis sounds a lot like reality TV that claims to be unscripted, but clearly isn't.
- reaperducer 6y agoI can donate to The Real Housewives of Atlanta?
- wil421 6y agoI’m almost positive if you told them about patreon they would do it if they haven’t already. Or onlyfans...
- Tade0 6y agoThe youth that I interact with has grown to be automatically sceptical of such things. 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?
- IWorkAtBigCo 6y agoManagement is getting harder. I have a generation of developers that won't believe anything we tell them.
- EE84M3i 6y agoWhat sort of things do they not believe?
- JoelMcCracken 6y agoI mean, how often are you telling them the real, true, unadulterated truth? How often do you even know that truth yourself? Folks in management routinely filter messages. What surprises me more is that you are aware that your developers don't believe you.
- 6y ago
- radoslawc 6y agoThanks for posting this. Lots of people (including me) actively report animal abuse channels which youtube seems to pay little regard to. This issue was reported by penguinz0, Officer Paw Patrol, PaymoneyWubby and various other youtubers before. In the mean time accounts like 'Peluchin Entertainment' (kid that tortured and killed his cat and uploaded it to YT) is still up (it was banned after few months of internet outrage, but it's up again).
- userbinator 6y agoI'm not surprised --- there's lots of fake "restoration" channels too.
- Nextgrid 6y agoPretty much every genre that becomes popular on YouTube attracts a large chunk of bottom-feeders that churn out insane quantities of low-quality content (multiple accounts, clickbait titles, etc). There are plenty of "Primitive Technology" knockoffs too.
- Nerada 6y agoNot an easy watch, it's a special kind of disturbing when people willingly torment small animals.
- iamAtom 6y agoWhy they aren't punished yet ? This is horrible Good job @Nick Crowley for exposing this Psychopath
- krona 6y agoI also want to highlight something which I haven't heard anyone talk about yet: the desensitization to animal abuse in the form of thousands of 'funny' TikTok videos and WhatsApp gifs. 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.
- shuntress 6y agoDoes WhatsApp have some sort of public discovery features that are not apparent or not enabled by default? Like saying "thousands of 'funny' TikTok videos and iMessage gifs", it seems weird to group TikTok and WhatsApp this way.
- angio 6y agoThere is no public discovery feature but WhatsApp has been widely used to share this type of videos (together with revenge porn videos) since they don't monitor the chat content.
- shuntress 6y agoI really don't understand the supposed equivalence here. 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?
- krona 6y agoI didn't want to single out WhatsApp, but it's popular and I use it daily myself. Specifically I'm referring to their gif providers (which I believe are Giphy and Tenor.) and is essentially content available to everyone who uses the app.
- 013a 6y agoYou may be underestimating the size and scope of some of the big WhatsApp channels. Beyond a certain point they really look like a traditional social network, and not an isolated group of people sharing something in common. 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. [1] https://top.gg/servers/list/top https://top.gg/servers/list/top
- encom 6y agoThe fact that Google doesn't care about this, is the least surprising thing ever. Unless he accidentally plays some pop music track in the background of a video, there's no way this will get taken down.
- lm28469 6y agoIf it brings viewers/money and isn't an extremely violent crime (or god forbid, titties) you can be sure google won't do shit about it.
- jbverschoor 6y agoInteresting to see that youtube (google) tolerates video's that bring ad revenue, but easily without notice or reason shuts down someone's email, or normal channel.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoNonsense. Demonetization is a huge issue in youtube.
- jerf 6y agoYouTube fed me a couple of these videos before I blocked the channel(s); I didn't completely put all the pieces together that it was abuse like this but I intuited that they were at least manipulative, because they were just too interesting. My wife had an internship for her degree at an animal rescue facility. Though they didn't deal in pets, real animal rescue stories tend to be more like "someone found this animal; they took it to the rescue facility, it got better or it didn't, and they released it or not". You don't get: "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.
- duxup 6y agoUnfortunately I think it fits the ... "everything is amplified on Youtube" type ecosystem that it stops being a weirdly storybook story and ... it's just what you expect to see so you don't notice it. 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....
- 6y ago
- rasz 6y agoSame submission with same title month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24610404 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfpjlxgJMMc Fake food clickbait https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSBSzWmjXO0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSBSzWmjXO0 Fake NASA engineer glitter bomb clickbait https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/21/glitter-bomb-video-was-partially-faked-former-nasa-engineer-confirms.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/21/glitter-bomb-video-was-parti... Fake parkour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9UbIynGdsQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9UbIynGdsQ Fake electric trucks ;-) https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/315151-electric-vehicle-company-admits-it-faked-fuel-cell-semi-truck-demo https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/315151-electric-vehicle-... Fake speed records https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N22JfNHiC1k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N22JfNHiC1k Critical thinking should be taught in school :/
- CivBase 6y agoYou really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?
- bigwavedave 6y ago> 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.
- icandoit 6y agoDon'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. :)
- gnu8 6y agoI 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.
- mekoka 6y agoA few years ago I noticed how popular some of the early rescues captured on videos were getting and I became worried that this exact situation would become a thing. Fast-forward today and humanity is as predictable as ever, animal "rescuers" on camera have multiplied like mushrooms. 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.
- nelsonenzo 6y agoIf multiples of us report them for music licensing violations (at least 3 reports per video) it may at least immediately stop them and force youtube to look at them. Wish I was kidding.
- hirundo 6y agoThis seems to be a variation of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a rare disorder that's a favorite of medical TV dramas. I think I saw it on ER, St. Elsewhere and Chicago Hope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factitious_disorder_imposed_on_another 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.
- colanderman 6y agoThe novel and miniseries Sharp Objects explores this disorder as well. I wonder if this is technically that disorder however, since it seems to be primarily cash-motivated.
- klodolph 6y agoThat made me wonder how rare it was. I found this literature review which suggests that while “rare”, > 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. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2990557/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2990557/
- Zigurd 6y agoMunchausen by virality
- kobalsky 6y agoI'm betting on this being pure greed.
- zomglings 6y agoI could not watch your whole video. The cruelty of these "rescuer" rings defies belief. 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?
- progre 6y agoSearch on youtube for "puppy jungle house". There are at least 4 channels dedicated to "rescue" dogs and cats that gets amazing jungle playgrounds. Videos are in the quiet style of "primitive technology".
- kalal 6y agoYouTube, it is your fault! It is too painful to watch such videos and knowing that the fix is possible. Efforts like YouTube-BB (https://research.google.com/youtube-bb/explore.html https://research.google.com/youtube-bb/explore.html) clearly shows, that you have the capacity to process and annotate large quantities of videos manually. So hire annotators and manually check every video. Then stop the full channel.
- seles 6y agoThese channels are immoral and against YT's TOS. YT should take them down, but they haven't (yet). 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 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?
- amelius 6y agoYou could also flag the content, as explained here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK8qRNSmhEU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK8qRNSmhEU
- seles 6y agoI was under the impression it was already being flagged and ignored. Could you explain how that would help? BTW I cannot view that link... "This site can’t be reached" :)
- kome 6y agoit's a couple of poor people in south-east asia making some money on youtube... is that more exploitative and cruel to animals than the meat industry? i don't think so.
- chordalkeyboard 6y agoI do think it's worse. The YT videos are a form of entertainment whereas the treatment animals get in the food industry is in the service of feeding people. Yes, 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. In this case the suffering of the animal is the spectacle that is being offered as the product.
- kome 6y ago"The YT videos are a form of entertainment whereas the treatment animals get in the food industry is in the service of feeding people." 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.
- chordalkeyboard 6y agoboth are for money but the suffering of the animal is necessary for the video and unnecessary for the food.
- bigbubba 6y agoI'm sure there are plenty of 'poor people in south-east asia making some money on youtube' who are doing it without making fraudulent content. Why don't you save your sympathy for them, rather than offering it to the scammers?
- koreanguy 6y agodisgusting Vietnamese youtubers who are profiting from poor animals, on facebook the dodo animal videos you see are doing the same by another gang.
- koreanguy 6y agodisgusting , terrible people who are doing this, I have encountered these Vietnamese groups on Facebook. dodo animal videos, probably by the same gang.
- surround 6y agoYouTuber Shawn Woods posts weekly videos on mousetraps. He has done much to educate people on humane ways to trap and kill pests, and condemns the use of traps which prolong suffering, such as sticky traps. 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.
- andromeduck 6y agoThe big problem with valley based media platforms in general is that there's very little cultural diversity along some dimensions such as urban/rural or geographically due to being almost exclusively located in SF/LA metro areas. It also seems to me that both conservatives and progressives here share a pretty strong paternalistic leanings here
- Nextgrid 6y agoThere are also knockoff mousetrap videos that are obvious animal abuse that are recommended on Shawn Wood’s videos. Unbelievable that they would censor the original (which is quite tame and tries its best to make it humane) but leaves the obvious abuse unchecked.
- cutitout 6y agoAlso notice one of the follow-up videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WXZU6CTVts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WXZU6CTVts > 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?
- Wistar 6y agoYeah, that hardly seems equitable.
- jdndbfbf 6y agoThere are many channels devoted to animal abuse on youtube. Some of the worst are where store bought mice are dropped in glue traps and they struggle to death. It's disturbing.
- namanyayg 6y agoThe creator of the video has done a great expose and thorough research but is unsure about some parts that I think I can clear up. * 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Bjorkbat 6y agoI'm way more upset with Youtube than I am with the scammers. 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.