from Hacker News

Tell HN: Someone seems to be trying to make people more fearful through YouTube

by santah on 1/26/21, 8:40 AM with 30 comments

I run https://next-episode.net (a TV tracking service).

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

    Nice find. Seems like something created by a script. Show descriptions scraped from imdb, the trailers too I guess. I watched some and the crime featured in the news was perpetrated by black people... Also the first has the title wrong, Quad instead of Adam, this led me to think about automation. But the Hot Wheels one has a news report about a teen hijacking a car, automated or not, that seems done on purpose.

  • by rayajason on 1/26/21, 10:50 PM

    I'm shocked how people who are correctly formulating this as an attempt to frame black people a criminals and to scare white people are down voted! Open your eyes people! And if you care about your fellow humans, please report it

  • by nanna on 1/26/21, 10:54 AM

    More fearful of black men.

    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 niche shows might simply be because the bigger budget ones DMCA them (or there's too much competition in search to make them worth it).

    The agenda to promote fears of black people seems pretty obvious.

  • by ALittleLight on 1/26/21, 11:10 AM

    From your description I thought it would be ad fraud - basically someone sticking autogenerated videos together on channels to make their bots watch them to hopefully get their videos recommended and make ad revenue. After watching 10 (just the beginning) I no longer think that's right (but it still might be a component).

    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

    I strongly believe that in the next four to five years a majority of the content on the platform will be machine generated. It's fascinating how many military weapons history / "news" channels are almost 100% voiced by machines and placed over public domain gov't produced video of the navy / airforce [0].

    Always very interesting to see the kinds of audio / video dithering used to defeat the YouTube algorithm!

    0 - https://www.youtube.com/c/MilitaryUpdate/videos

  • by xtiansimon on 1/26/21, 12:27 PM

    These ‘artifacts’ are certainly very strange semantically (if you consider everything on the internet is what the label says it is).

    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

    Could it be a form of retaliation to the BLM movement? All the stitched videos are news about crimes committed by black men.

  • by auganov on 1/27/21, 1:31 AM

    There is actually a non-trailer video on the channel and it happens to be "Muslim Somalian Refugee attack 60 Minutes Journalist Reporters in Sweden". Seems to confirm OP's hunch. Hard to come up with a scenario in which the same script would put that one and all the others up. Didn't review all of them but the news clips in trailer videos seem pretty different. Doubt this would be the script erroring out and uploading just the first part.

    https://youtube.com/watch?v=r6UgjgCSbf8

  • by kypro on 1/26/21, 12:47 PM

    Channels which used to report on black on white crime have started to be removed from YouTube over the last couple of years so I suspect they're now looking for less explicit ways to post this type of content.

  • by VoodooJuJu on 1/26/21, 8:41 PM

    > To me - it looks like it's a concerted effort by some entity to try and raise (certain?) peoples fears

    Which certain peoples? Did it raise your fears? Which type person are you?

  • by ThisIsMeEEE on 1/27/21, 6:07 AM

    It seems like an auto-generated videos and this article might help https://hackernoon.com/unethical-growth-hacks-a-look-into-th...

    I saw someone posted it already here in HN similar to this.

  • by sparkling on 1/26/21, 11:15 PM

    Not sure of these are being automatically generated by a script or someone is manually editing and uploading them

    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

    Is it just me or do others also feel raised blood pressure, tingling in forearms, and other physical symptoms after watching violent videos?

    These disturbing videos can kill my productivity for hours.

  • by gt565k on 1/26/21, 11:20 PM

    Reported the channel to youtube.

    Let's see what they say.

  • by ManlyBread on 1/26/21, 9:53 AM

    To me it seems like trolling, perhaps this is targeted at a specific niche community?