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Fake animal rescue videos have become a new frontier for animal abuse
- jimjames88 5y agoPaywall
- thaumasiotes 5y agonationalgeographic.com is an obnoxious website. It will pop up a "give us your email address" overlay, which you can safely delete. You can resume reading the article by removing the style attribute that has been applied to the <body> tag.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ComputerGuru 5y agoGet BehindTheOverlay revival.
- chrisseaton 5y ago> which you can safely delete Sounds a lot less obnoxious than most.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoReader mode works wonders.
- blondin 5y agoi made it a rule to mark "not interested" any video "the dodo" puts out there. among many others. something just doesn't seem right with them as a whole. and yet youtube keeps recommending and encouraging these kind of channels.
- colanderman 5y agoThe Dodo is one of the few that feels legitimate to me. Most of their videos are just of animals that live with rehabilitators. I don't think I've seen any videos from them of animals in dangerous situations being "rescued". (If anyone knows anything to the contrary please share though.)
- h4l0 5y agoI agree with you. Most of their stories usually span a year or two, meaning that they cannot be fabricated. The Dodo is way more legitimate than anything discussed in the article.
- blondin 5y agolegitimacy is not the issue. being legit doesn't make their videos right. "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.
- rewq4321 5y agoYou're arguing that abuse should be hidden? For many people (including myself), they first found out about terrible happenings in the world via YouTube videos, and besides this education being important for better understanding the world, it actually motivates them to do something about it. 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.
- ceejayoz 5y agoI’d argue that the success of The Dodo helps drive the success of the nastier copycats as people seek out or are recommended their content too.
- somedude895 5y ago
- nathanvanfleet 5y agoThis world is a never ending nightmare.
- habeebtc 5y agoYoutube is a never ending nightmare.
- yadaeno 5y agoAnything that relies on advertiser revenue and uses an algorithm to maximize revenue is a nightmare.
- ffggvv 5y agoeven if you don’t rely on ads, having more views will always be desirable. netflix optimizes as much for playtime as youtube does because the more someone uses it, the less likely they’ll cancel it. 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
- arglebarglegar 5y agoit doesn’t have to be, youtube doesn’t need to publicize like and review counts, for example
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoYeah, it's frankly lead to me often thinking that were AI to take over and attempt to exterminate humanity I might be on their side.
- LurkingPenguin 5y agoAI isn't needed. Between plagues, the effects of climate change, etc., Mother Nature has this covered.
- hfkktntnrfn 5y agoI see on FB a different kind of fake animal rescue videos, with only a single animal - something like saving a cat stuck in wet concrete, or a dog who "fell" down a drain, videos with tens of millions of views. It's pretty obvious if you watch them that the person filming them put the animals in that situation in the first place.
- tommica 5y agoOh crap, I've not thought of that before... That is so obvious on hindsight, of course some people would do that >:(
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Wistar 5y agoMy wife and I just came to this same realization. There's just too many of these polished rescue videos to be real.
- rewq4321 5y agoThere is a very deep rabbit hole of this content, and the ones that are staged "well" can have millions of views, but if you click into the channel and go through their other content, you quickly see that they're pumping out these videos every few days - always with the same camera/resolution, the same voices/languages and rough geographic locations. Very clearly monetized animal torture. 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-animalcruelty-babymonkeytorture-content-and-endthetrend https://www.change.org/p/youtube-make-youtube-stop-all-anima... [1] https://www.ccn.com/youtube-has-a-vile-monkey-torture-community-that-needs-nuking/ https://www.ccn.com/youtube-has-a-vile-monkey-torture-commun... [2] NSFL: https://twitter.com/protect_wldlife/status/1424301979044614144?lang=en https://twitter.com/protect_wldlife/status/14243019790446141... [3] https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/14032495/youtube-baby-monkeys-torture-animal-cruelty/ https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/14032495/youtube-baby-monkeys-...
- h4l0 5y agoPaymoneyWubby made a video about this like 2 years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mvVQCl8fIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mvVQCl8fIg . Nothing has changed since then. People will keep buying into this until platforms intervene.
- ceilingcorner 5y agoIf I found an animal on the side of the road, I don’t think the first thing I’d do is whip out my camera and record it. So these types of videos always seemed inherently fake to me But I’m not a big social media user, so maybe it’s normal to immediately record anything out of the ordinary?
- TheCowboy 5y agoIt's actually the first thing I do because the chances of the lost pet allowing you to approach are usually not great. This gives me a better chance of getting a good shot or two I can post on Nextdoor.
- kfoley 5y ago> 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.
- ve55 5y agoI spent some time looking at Youtube reccommendations in fresh browser session (no cookies or account) yesterday and was contiually amazed by the types of videos that would often have 10M or even 100M views. The clickbait styles used by nearly all large channels have gotten so amazingly efficient that it seems like they near-perfectly pinpoint various biases and draws in our psyche now, and looking at the large categories of different genres of suggestions was an almost surreal experience in how similarly they targeted potential viewers. A lot of the content was obviously fake, and much of what was not obviously fake was significantly exaggerated for obvious reasons, with the method of exaggeration varying according to the genre of content. 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.
- download13 5y agoRemoving recommendation systems entirely, for now, would be a massive improvement, but that won't happen because none of us get input into that decision. The people who make it have only profit to consider, and the recommendation system gets them more profit.
- GuB-42 5y agoThere is no way YouTube could work without a recommendation system. The volume is so huge you would get lost in the middle of videos of kids posting gameplay sessions for their friends. 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.
- brundolf 5y agoContinuing our rapid descent into the strangest and most mundanely-evil dystopia.
- hellbannedguy 5y agoLeave kids, and animals, out of your narcisstic filthy Lucre videos. I was glad when that aussie was stabbed in the heart by a Batray. And yes--I know it's complicated in his case. Sorry, but any exploitation of animals bother me, along with phony nonprofits.
- PretzelPirate 5y ago> Sorry, but any exploitation of animals bother me, along with phony nonprofits. Make sure you don't ignore the exploitation and abuse that's inherent in the animal agriculture industry. Don't consume or use animal products if you want to avoid supporting animal abuse.
- rozab 5y agoWhen I first tried out TikTok a while back, the initial set of videos I was 'seeded' with included a great deal of really shocking animal abuse videos (dogs that had been buried in mud or concrete and are 'rescued', lots of animals being cooked or eaten alive, etc). I didn't interact with anything in the app but as these made me pause in shock, it lead me down a rabbit hole of them. Just another example of how optimising for attention is a horrible idea.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y agoAnimals being eaten is not unethical. If anything killing strays and eating them is actually better since the animal is not just being killed for pest control. We westerners just like to think eating dogs is somehow evil when you look at the last hundred years because of war, it was way more common than you'd think. I personally wouldn't advocate eating them, but, there is absolutely nothing wrong with it.
- kayodelycaon 5y agoI think eating an animal before you killed it is just a bit barbaric…
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y agoThe Japanese do it with fish and other sea creatures...
- rewq4321 5y agoHow could you possibly think that this makes it ethical? This is a troll-level comment, but somehow I think you're being earnest. Please sit back and reflect on what you're saying here. If it's because you don't think that animals can suffer, then read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness#Cambridge_Declaration_on_Consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness#Cambridge...
- webwielder2 5y agoYouTube only ever recommends to me videos about debunking fake videos instead of the fake videos themselves. Does this mean I'm savvy?
- BoiledCabbage 5y agoNo, but it likely leverages your ego/insecurity in thinking you're more savvy than the average person.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- assface 5y agoPig Rescues Baby Goat https://youtube.com/watch?v=g7WjrvG1GMk https://youtube.com/watch?v=g7WjrvG1GMk
- Wistar 5y agoOkay, THAT would be hard to stage.
- psyklic 5y ago"Nathan stages a viral video of a pig saving a drowning baby goat in order to make Oakland petting zoo an international destination." - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noTz20TB714 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noTz20TB714
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Wistar 5y agoOkay, THAT would be easy to stage.
- foxfired 5y agoThe medium is the message. When on YouTube, act like youtubers. It didn't start this way but as the platform has matured, content creators converged on what works. It's the same way you can tell a video is from tiktok even if the watermark is removed.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
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- somedude895 5y agoI keep getting recommended animal rescue videos of The Dodo and something about them always rubs me the wrong way. Maybe it's the emotional music or maybe it's the fact that they're making money off animal suffering, even if it always ends with a feel good happy ending.