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I 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 v

by krona 6y ago

I 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 ago
Does 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 ago
  There 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 ago
    I 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 ago
      I 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 ago
  You 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
srtjstjsj 6y ago
It's the old America's Funniest Home Videos but bigger and worse.
- geocrasher 6y ago
  Exactly. "Here's a video of a person being grievously injured... but we've put a laugh track on it, so now it's FUNNY!" 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.
dredmorbius 6y ago
Imgur as well.

by krona 6y ago

shuntress 6y ago

Does 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 ago
There 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    I 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 ago
You 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

srtjstjsj 6y ago

It's the old America's Funniest Home Videos but bigger and worse.

geocrasher 6y ago
Exactly. "Here's a video of a person being grievously injured... but we've put a laugh track on it, so now it's FUNNY!" 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.

dredmorbius 6y ago

Imgur as well.