by santah on 1/26/21, 8:40 AM with 30 comments
As part of my maintenance routine and on a daily basis - I look for newly released trailers for the most popular upcoming shows.
A weird pattern I noticed through the years are rogue YouTube channels like this one:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-VJ2EpzBRQMJYLO1fV1X3g/vid...
(I've stumbled upon 5-6 channels EXACTLY like this one - same channel and video naming pattern, approximately the same number of videos, just for different shows)
Check out 2-3 random trailers. Notice anything out of place?
Each and every one of these seemingly innocent TV show trailers have a short video stitched before the actual trailer (and sometimes after as well).
These stitched videos are always scary news reports about people being attacked, robbed or murdered.
The choice of shows to upload trailers for seems random at first, but if you look closer - those are all relatively obscure and niche shows with fairly small following.
To me - it looks like it's a concerted effort by some entity to try and raise (certain?) peoples fears?
I'm not sure who or why would be doing this, but I thought it might be a good idea to expose this here for some discussion and further investigation?
by gpas on 1/26/21, 9:37 AM
by rayajason on 1/26/21, 10:50 PM
by nanna on 1/26/21, 10:54 AM
I've clicked through ten if these so far and every single one involves black men accused of violent crime.*
Whether or not the intention is so, the effect is clearly to charge racist fears.
* Update: Twenty, and one of a black woman. This is clearly a racist channel and it should not have reached the front page of HN.
by notahacker on 1/26/21, 11:07 AM
The agenda to promote fears of black people seems pretty obvious.
by ALittleLight on 1/26/21, 11:10 AM
As another commenter mentioned the criminals in the news stories all seem to be black men. There are also news stories at the end too, at least on some. The "actual" or purported content doesn't even seem to be trailers necessarily so much as random clips from the movie or show. It's not edited together like a trailer, at least from the ones I watched.
Someone has a large collection of news reports to find a variety of violent black criminals. That probably means they are putting these together manually? Mental illness? Strange.
by koolk3ychain on 1/26/21, 9:57 PM
Always very interesting to see the kinds of audio / video dithering used to defeat the YouTube algorithm!
by xtiansimon on 1/26/21, 12:27 PM
While the juxtaposition is referentially alarming, and has a pattern, that does not prove the nature of the intent as racist. In other words the seemingly easy pattern for the auditor/audience could also be an easy formula for the maker—especially if it were a bot.
Does anyone know the state of the art for auto-editing and related auto-labeling to say that such content would be easy for a bot to assemble. An easy—excuse the expression— ‘toy’ example?
Not knowing much about the domain, but I also imagine this content could also be manually edited experiment for labeling experiments?
Relatedly, I recall early Twitterbot experiments. They were usually silly, strange, and all had a clearly detectable conceit.
I’m still subscribed to one called Archillect (https://twitter.com/archillect). Early days I recall most images were very dark—both monochromatic and thematically. Their "art" would be the subjective evaluation of a visual with it's interpretation ('being' and 'seeming' dark both visually and thematically--lots of anime or high-tech, and not much 'nature').
I’m not saying this isn’t the work of a @$$h@l3.
EDIT: edited my description of Archillect as artistic experiment.
by SwiftyBug on 1/26/21, 9:08 PM
by auganov on 1/27/21, 1:31 AM
by kypro on 1/26/21, 12:47 PM
by VoodooJuJu on 1/26/21, 8:41 PM
Which certain peoples? Did it raise your fears? Which type person are you?
by ThisIsMeEEE on 1/27/21, 6:07 AM
I saw someone posted it already here in HN similar to this.
by sparkling on 1/26/21, 11:15 PM
On the one hand the video title patterns seem to not be formated consistency. But then all the thumbnails seem like a script is fetching images off Google and stretching them to 16:9 aspect ratio
In any case, nice find.
by simplemen on 1/27/21, 5:14 PM
These disturbing videos can kill my productivity for hours.
by gt565k on 1/26/21, 11:20 PM
Let's see what they say.
by ManlyBread on 1/26/21, 9:53 AM