Deceptive Media Tactics That Piss Me Off, Part 1
A Youtube short depicting a boy getting drilled in the head by a fastball with the title: “Kid gets killed on field by baseball pitch!!!”
Source for all photos in this article: The Shankman’s Youtube page
The video is exactly one minute long, was posted six years ago, and has 1,721,055 views.
In the video, a high-school-aged-ish baseball player takes a fastball to the head. He gets up, paces for a second. Turns left to greet his coach who is walking toward him from the visitor dugout, quickly chats with him, and then turns and walks to first base. That’s the whole video.
Nobody dies on-camera. Certainly not “on field”. In fact, we can’t be sure whether or not the kid lived or died, because there is no information posted anywhere linking to the source of this video. Not a news article, not the original video, not a facebook post.
In fact, the only entry in the “About” section is:
No matter if the kid dies in real life some time after this one minute clip, or if he took one to the head but was completely okay, “Lol” is the most horseshit, nothing phrase you could possibly put in this section, and Mr. Shankman is deeply unethical for that.
I cannot say for sure, but my strong guess is, this is also not Mr. Shankman’s original upload. It must’ve come from somewhere real.
This Youtuber only has four total on his page. This video, a video of a kid being nonsensical after anesthesia, a video of a high school game-winning buzzer-beater basket against an NBA player in his youth (the “blah blah blah X FAMOUS THING!” type of titles are for another blog post), and strangely, one short in the “shorts” of a pretty adorable 11-ish year old boy reviewing a fidget spinner.
The descriptions are all nothing descriptions like “Lol”.
This Form Can’t Be Empty
K den.
Here’s why ambiguity is a problem:
Because the content has no information, the title can EQUALLY mean, “Kid loses their life on the field,” OR, “Kid got hit by a pitch and it SUCKED, but he was fine.” Because he eventually took first base.
I have anecdotal evidence that confirms that the first one CAN happen: Over ten years ago, my brothers had a member of their high school baseball team die because he got a concussion (undiagnosed) playing hockey, and days later the brain swelling ruptured. A hard hit of anything is more than capable of killing someone.
But, he does not “die on field” like the video suggests. That coupled with the bare about me section leaves half the people sure that it’s another stupid clickbait and they want their minute back. So what WILL and DOES happen is this:
Half the people think it’s real, and half the people think it’s fake, and they argue about it.
Trolling comments, funny comments, “He’s being sarcastic, bro” comments. Some comment threads are over 50 comments long of fighting over whether it’s real or not real.
After reading through about 1000 of them, not one person linked to a news article, the original uploader’s page, a Facebook post, or anything of the like.
Here’s why it pisses me off.
Those 1,200 comments, 1.7-whatever million views, and video remixes tell the Youtube algorithm:
“You’re getting a lot of engagement on this video. It must be high-quality! We’ll pop this up on more people’s feeds, now.”
-Viewers to Youtube algorithms
What it ALSO does, is accrue ad revenue for Mr. Shankman for each engagement, and once a month, sends him a payment.
It is in his best interest to leave this video as ambiguous as possible because when people argue on the internet or spend a certain amount of that one minute watching the video, he makes money. That is rotten to the core.
This works because people like me watched it a few times (first by accident because of the preview, and then for real because I couldn’t resist finding out what happened- I was invested), and people like those guys ^ above sit around arguing with strangers on the internet and make the creator money.
Using the algorithms to do this is partially why U.S. society has a division problem. They are created in a way that provides the highest chance of potential “engagement” by stealing your attention and provoking your hormones. What is always missing is context.
You can find this same thing happening in every source of media and about any subject, which I vent extensively about in the blog that is linked. Social media is formatted in a way that captures a specific amount of your attention, provokes you to engage, and makes money from it.
A Youtuber I respect very much named Kyle Hill made a video about a phenomenon adjacent to this one regarding the crisis of:
“an epidemic of mis- and dis-leading content made to scam your attention, written and read by bots, created by probably nefarious individuals for monetary gain alone.”
I highly recommend Kyle’s extremely entertaining and informative video after reading this post.
I doubt this phenomenon will ever be moderated, so in the meantime…
My recommendations:
Understand what makes a headline sensational. Is it open-ended? Is it extreme? Does it seem juicy? Does it use a hot-topic word (a buzzword) that triggers an emotion in you? Does the “About” section contain links to original reports, or other satisfactory sources? Can anyone in the comments provide context and PROOF of the headline if the “About” section does not? Ask yourself all these questions before you even click the thing.
Ask yourself, who is making money from this video coming across my eyeballs? There is ALWAYS someone. There is money in working the algorithms in social media. A lot of money.
Look for sources yourself if you were made to feel a certain way after consuming the media. You are doing yourself a favor by doing this: you may calm down after verifying something is not real, you’ll be opening yourself up to potentially new knowledge regardless of if it’s false OR true, and you’re preventing other people from receiving undeserved reactionary behavior from you if the content of the media ever comes up in real life.
Report, report, report! A lot of AI/spam/bot accounts WILL be taken down once they are found to be deceptive, sensational, or downright incorrect. It remains to be seen whether a condensed version of this blog (a spiel) is sufficient reason to have a channel taken down but I had to try.
To wrap it all up!
It is worth it to do all we can to prevent faceless people from having agency over our feelings and profiting off of them, especially when the context is not clear and we can’t find facts.
We should be conscious not to participate in giving these manipulators an income by spending time on poor quality media or feeding the trolls in the comment section.
And this deserves its own line:
Even media we trust has the power to deceive us.
No one should be exempt from examination.
One final thought, if this page is indeed run by a teenager who is intrigued by the idea of having a lot of money young, doing as little work as possible, the creators who taught him the algorithm-manipulating tactics to achieve that should feel a LITTLE shame for promoting schemes that have such a high potential to exploit people.
