Veritasium's new video on Jumping Spiders is having its sponsor Better Help on blast in the top comments. Should we hold content creators to account?

dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 253 points –

Should we stop supporting them with our eyes for taking sponsorships from shady companies?

Edit: I took my first step and unsubscribed from the channel and I will continue to withhold my viewership to those that don’t take better care of the viewers.

Likely doesn’t matter, but I’m on a roll of not giving my money to companies that are immoral so why not do the same with my eyes.

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A channel absolutely should be held accountable for the sponsors they accept. Advertisements from YouTube are mostly outside channel owners control, but sponsors are not.

I don't support channels with unethical sponsors. It can be tough sometimes.

Veritasium is YouTube propaganda. It's well documented - Derek takes sponsor money and gets people killed in the process. I blocked Derek on all platforms the day Tom put this documentary video out.

I've hated him for so long. Glad to see it's getting some light

Funnily enough the person that made this video had a little controversy on the vape-o-nomics video when he was talking about how subscription services were bad but then immediately pivoted towards an ad read for a subscription service.

Eventually it was removed (without a comment talking about, it happened silently) but still this stuff reaches everyone eventually.

~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~

I’m out of the loop, what did Better Help do?

Sharing users' mental health information with advertisers and connecting LGBT users with Christian faith-based therapists are the two big issues I'm aware of

Yikes! Yeah, that’s messed up. Thanks for the info!

Better Help is also awful for the therapists, it basically turns them into contracted gig workers and they're less invested in their clients' success. It's also awful for the clients, because going to therapy is hard and requires hard work and facing some difficult things. The platform makes it overly easy to switch therapists whenever, and a sizeable chunk of people will jump shark when challenged, continuing to throw money down the Better Help hole with no progress to show for it

Wow 😲 I'm so surprised that a therapy app with shortened appointments and suspicious pricing is bad for anyone! There's no possible way to have anticipated such a thing would fail in such a harmful way.

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Is there a source for this? I'm generally very positive on therapy and helping people get access to it, but fuck them if that's the case (and fuck the US healthcare system in general. Although I will say that where I'm at now, Japan, is even worse with mental healthcare not being covered by insurance (only psychiatry is covered; some psychologists having sliding fee scales but sometimes it's students and, if you don't speak Japanese well enough to articulate your issues in the language, then the premium for foreign language support is real)).

Just as an FYI: although laws are strict about US-based therapists practicing only in states where they are licensed, there are no laws regulating international practice of psychotherapy. If the people you’re talking about have a hard time in Japanese, they may be able to to find a telehealth therapist in their country of origin who speaks their native language and is embedded in their native culture. You have to deal with timezone shenanigans, but it beats going without. Something to consider.

Yeah, I fully agree. The yen being super weak right now has put some people off of such (it was about 110-115 yen: 1 dollar when I came, now it's 160 T_T)

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I think part of it is selling mental health data to companies such as meta. I dont know if it was anonymised but either way it's horrible

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Google got rid of the dislike count on videos for a reason, holding content creators accountable is absolutely what should be done. It's horseshit to think that content creators shouldn't be accountable for the sponsorships they take.

Am I just old, even by internet standards? Because we've been here before. Better Help was blasted on the internet several years ago for their shady business practices. Several major YouTubers published "make good" videos about it, because of how bad the service was. Better Help was giving YouTubers and podcasters a shitload of money to promote their product, and in their terms they explicitly stated that they did not verify the credentials of their "therapists" and that it was on you to do that.

We have been here before. I don't remember who made it but there's a really good video on YouTube explaining why better help started another massive ad campaign on YouTube. Better help was involved with a fraudulent doctor finder website that was directing people to better help. That website got shutdown by the FTC just before better help increased YouTube funding so the hypothesis is they are trying to recoup that lost income because it was a significant revenue source.

Well, that does make some sense. I swear some of the channels who have these sponsorships are the same channels that had them last time around too.

I feel like this wasn't even that long ago? I was quite surprised when my content suddenly started being sponsored by them again.

Veratasium had some similar issue a few years ago too, didn't he?

There was a video he did on a startup taxi service using self driving cars. Basically the entire thing was an advertisement for that company.
Then another Youtuber, Tom Nicholas, released a video about that a few months later and how it's an issue. I'll have to watch it again as I don't remember what he specifically talks about.

His video with one of those "genetic research" companies was very bad anti-privacy propaganda, where they used the excuse of catching the Golden State Killer as justification for storing and using the related genetic information of masses of unconsenting individuals.

He's also dipped several times into making state department propaganda like Smarter Every Day consistently does. Not nearly quite as bad as him yet though.

And he's made several videos about failures of capitalism, wherein he very obviously refuses to identify it as the problem. Like the one about planned obsolescence or leaded gasoline and another I'm forgetting.

He also has a habit of making videos that are just long ads, like that self-driving car, or that shampoo

I've watched his leaded gasoline video, capitalism doesn't seem like something he would need to bring up? Unless I'm not remembering the video correctly, the cause of the problems aren't something he goes into

I recall Tom Nichols making a video on them and also perhaps an incorrect video about electricity so probably.

The electricity one wasn't so much him being wrong as it was him being really bad at communicating that one point

On the electricity video, he was actually correct. It was mostly a matter of semantics and people clinging to the common models of electricity.

I’m not really sure it was just semantics. He was technically correct the light would get some power right away, but the thing everyone would understand when hearing the main assertion, i.e. the light is fully lit and the circuit is in its relatively steady, final state, is very much not true.

Philip de Franco did a better help sponsor and his community went up in arms about it. now he doesn't touch it with a 10 foot pole. surprised more communities don't care about it

most people don't know anything about it. they skip sponsors and watch the videos. it's not complicated.

most people.

Meaning not all people, meaning some people can get screwed over. By a content creator they’re supporting.

You’re right it’s not complicate. Just unsubscribe from people that don’t respect the viewers. Or keep watching and only think about yourself and how it affects you.

—surprised more communities don't care about it
—most people don't know anything about it

meaning not all people, meaning some people do know about it, which is why some communities do care, but most don't know, which is why more communities don't seem to care.

edit: removed the aggressive part of my comment

My apologies.

I was just replying to comments when I woke up and it’s hard to be diligent of comments that are in a wider thread vs top level comments.

I should do better and I will try.

yo dawg I'm not telling you what to think but what you're saying is the fundamental thing the county is made of time and time again. you're just saying these things as a way to see the voices of the big blue building that sacrifices and sacrifices for what? you don't even know.

Don't let anybody tell you you can't consume or not consume whatever content you feel like. Theres an uptick in this weird attitude of "you're an asshole/fascist/whatever trying to cancel everyone" if you decide to stop watching someone or buying a product. Its bullshit, you don't owe anybody jack.

You're one person. Either you bailing won't matter, or a bunch of people bail and they learn their lesson. Either way you don't have to put up with a damn thing you don't want to. 🤷

Wow, those comments are a dumpster fire.

Not sure what Derek 's best response might be. I'm thinking that this video will likely be taken down and replaced by one without a sponsor.

To some degree, certainly! If at some point it comes out that a certain sponsor is just total shit, a content creator can be made aware of that. Although, with all these things, it is not always as easy to just drop a sponsor i suppose, there is always contracts involved and all of that. So not expecting a creator to be able to drop a sponsor all of a sudden.

I'm curious, what would happen if I, as a creator, had been contacted by a sponsor and then if the sponsor was shady, decided to not only say no to the contract, but also rag on them in the video where the sponsor would have been shilled?

It's likely they signed a contract with them before the (second) controversy, I feel like a better way to do this is to see if they continue with the shitty sponsors

But they should be held accountable for this kind of stuff

I do that kind of thing, yes. Although I usually find it so distasteful, that I lose interest in watching other videos anyways.

But yeah, especially when it's a channel making educational content, there's a chance that some viewers take the sponsored section as general educational content (no matter, whether that's because they're gullible, young or did not pay attention when the sponsor segway happened).

There's also various tech channels which recommend products that are objectively worse than the alternatives, or even exert malware-like behaviour. Those also immediately lose any and all respect from me.

Obviously, if it was a genuinely good product, it wouldn't need the sponsorship deal for people to make videos about it. So, I do understand the struggle.
But everyone wanting to make a living off of media has that struggle. If I artificially inflate the view numbers of one media creator, the others receive less sponsorship money.

At least consider it. It will make shady sponsors less valuable and more genuine sponsors more valuable.

They absolutely deserve to be blasted in the comments for a bad sponsor. It will make people reconsider their viewing decisions. If the video itself also wasn't great, don't be afraid to give it a big fat dislike, especially if you have the return YouTube dislike extension.

Additionally, if there are too many ads and sponsors, make your voice heard in the comments, and the creator might be sympathetic. I certainly am when I'm on the receiving end of a comment like that on my channel.

I watch basically any channel with 100,000+ subscribers through Piped so that my views or retention or engagement don't get counted by YouTube.

Veritasium endorsed a known racketeer and as a consequence some portion of their audience is now going to be defrauded in an economy where there's not a lot of room for that especially among those in need of therapy. Watching Veritasium videos causes the channel to have greater exposure, increasing the risk to the general population if engaged with by anyone. Therefore, engaging with this channel in any way is harmful to others.

I made sure to dislike the moment this sponsorship came up and closed the video. With analytics they should see the connection.

i like ur optimism. we need more ppl to do this.

Dr becky (atrology channel) also did a few sponsorships with them and got lots of unhappy comments under those videos. Not sure if she still sticks with them or no. Aaaaaaaand I just checked her last video from 7 hours ago and she still gets sponsorships from them. Top comments are asking her to stop accepting those sponsorships pointing out their doings.

Dr

astrology channel

One of these things does not add up...

I had to look up the term to notice what I did. I will leave it be I guess. Haha

Wait, what term? I wasn't saying you made a mistake; I was pointing out the ridiculousness of someone being a doctor but dealing in such unscientific nonsense as astrology.

 

Edit: Or, wait, did you actually make a typo and it was supposed to be "astronomy"? If so, I didn't even realize. xD

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she's not bad but there are better science/astronomy channels. I watch Anton Petrov religiously, I don't think he even does sponsors

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I don't watch any video that's sponsored by Ground News, and I complain in the comments

What's wrong with ground news?

To begin with, they operate with some very shady definitions of left and right.

Any political coordinates centered on American view of left and right are super skewed and already biased. If you consider Democrats to be "the left", boy something is wrong with that.

And when this happens, what you think is "unbiased news" is really just two flavors of right-wing propaganda, one a bit more extreme than the other.

When capitalists are doing minor successions to be just a bit less evil, this is not "left", and whatever is between that and fascist dictatorship is not the enlightened center.

TL;DR Ground News is one of the places that teach you the position between American Left and American Right is actually neutral and balanced. It is very much not.

I've notice a tremendous amount of ground news links on social media that weigh the stories wildly, and improbably inaccurately. I don't know if it's early results vs results over time, trolling, or what, but I genuinely do not trust their analysis anymore.

Examples include trump lovers supporting the rule of law (that's just convicted their guy) or liberals doubting biden (apparently 90% of likely biden voters were somehow reconsidering?) - I don't buy their spiel.

There's no such thing as unbiased news. News is informed by all kinds of biases at every moment, many of which are completely innocuous and harmless, even good.

For example, most news sources refer to people in stories as men or women, and use gendered pronouns. Gender is a social construct, so recognising it implicitly in an article is a bias. An unbiased news source would refer to everyone as they/them and never present a gender identity as fact. It would always refer to people as people. Well, except for the fact that personhood is a social construct too. And so is humanity. They'd have to call everyone beings or entities. And that's bad. An unbiased news source is bad. The news should have the bias that it presents people's gender identities as facts.

What Ground News presents as unbiased stories are usually center-biased stories, not unbiased stories. And the lie that centrism is unbiased is dangerous. Every story on Ground News is equally biased, because everything is a bias. Their bias rating is a dangerous lie. Because encouraging people to see the most common view as unbiased causes people to go along with whatever view is common, even if it's bad. Even if, for example, the government has been taken over by Nazis. Bias confirmation machines like Ground News are always dangerous, but they're especially dangerous when fascism begins to be normalised, which is the struggle we're currently facing.

This is a silly take. You can't ignore all news because all news has some form of bias. You should try to map out your sources to an even spread across the spectrum. Media literacy shouldn't entail just reading from what you find agreeable. That will inevitably lead to an epistemic bubble.

I have an even spread across the spectrum. I read antirealist news (left wing), socialist news (center), and even capitalist news (far right). That's a great diversity of sources.

Or by "whole spectrum", did you mean it would be a good idea for me to read Nazi news as well?

By spectrum I mean what you just described. I'm confused now. Didn't you say one comment above that you don't read anything from ground news?

Wait, really? Ground news has antirealist sources and describes all capitalist sources as extreme right wing? Okay, if that's true, you've changed my mind and ground news is awesome. Can you show me that it's true?

I have no idea what you're arguing for any more. In one comment you say you read across the spectrum but then you follow up with another comment and complain that ground news is not left enough or something. It makes no sense. I don't know who or what you're arguing for.

You weren't paying attention to which spectrum I described, were you? I was making a snide and witty comment with a light dash of sarcasm. You need to keep up.

I've been using Ground News for the last six months or so and quite like it. It does seem like you may have a misunderstanding of how it works though. Ground News is not, in itself, a "news outlet", nor does it generate articles, its an aggregator. When viewing a story there is an AI generated summary of all of the articles related to that story, but its generally no more than 3-5 bullet points, and certainly not enough information to form an opinion (nor is it intended to be). The user should read several of the articles and form their own opinion based on that. Further, their bias and factuality gauges use data thats averaged from external organizations, so again, not generated by Ground News itself. They lay it out here:

https://ground.news/rating-system

their bias and factuality gauges use data thats averaged from external organizations

And they shouldn't. Those sources are wrong and Ground News amplifies their wrongness. Everything is a bias. Reality is socially constructed and every piece of buy-in is a bias. From gender, to money, to race, to nations, to names, to humanity, to personhood.

I've been seeing a lot of ground news links with improbable numbers. I'm beginning to doubt their conceit.

they don't write the stories though, so can't control the pronouns. I do appreciate their effort to try make sense of the news with an alignment reading, but I agree with you that it encourages centrism in the long run

Yes, but why aren't they marking all the news sources that implicitly push the idea that gender exists as biased in that way? Why do they ignore certain biases and not others? The answer is that they're conflating bias with controversy. If something is uncontroversial, they're saying it's unbiased. That's bad.

I guess they level a political narrative over that of social narratives. As someone who's not LGBT (but obviously will always vote for the rights of others), it's the political one I care about most to read, and I'm guessing a majority of their readers too.

It's not an LGBT thing. I'm using gender as an example of a thing we can all agree is a social construct so I can make my point about bias without having to get any more controversial with it. But if you really want a political example, here is the same point but more political:

Every news source that refers to the existence of the United States of America is biased. The USA is a social construct, it doesn't have objective existence. And many groups have objected to its existence, as it's a genocidal state illegally occupying stolen land. Any news article which refers to the USA as though it were a thing that exists is implicitly pushing settler colonial narratives. This is a clear bias. Ground news should be labelling any article which refers to the USA as biased.

Anything, if you examine it, is just a social construct. The news sometimes wield these constructs to create false narratives to constrict our views/rights, but more often than not, the news is simply trying to convey a set of events from its perspective using a shared grammar that the majority of its audience will understand.

We cant push the frontier without having a base.

Yeah, now you're starting to get it. Everything is a social construct and all news is biased in favour of certain constructs. What Ground News does in judging some sources as less biased is dangerous nonsense.

Course, antirealists don't believe in a reality, so I'd say they're the only group which is capable of less bias than the human norm. And they're all anarcho communists.

I worry that so many calculations for everything would be very tiring quickly. I don't think I could do it.

Then choose to wilfully accept good biases into your life, and don't strive for the imaginary, impossible ideal of "unbiased"

Ok so we can't use ground new because of bias. Where do you suggest we go to get our news then. I agree that there will always be some bias but surely a system that gives you news from so many sources will be less biased than sticking to just one or two sources

surely a system that gives you news from so many sources will be less biased than sticking to just one or two sources

Not really. Suppose I show you one article that says vaccines don't cause autism. Now suppose I show you that one article, and 99 articles that say they do cause autism. Which one is giving you a more accurate view of the facts? Obviously, including more lies and misinformation will not reduce the amount of bias.

The point is to show different biases through their source’s own interpretation of facts, not to deliver unbiased news themselves.

Put another way, Ground News is kinda saying “here are some cold days, hot days, and in-between days. This is what we experience.” You’re sitting there saying “they’re liars! Have you forgotten 0 degrees kelvin and the center of the sun?!?”

We haven’t forgotten but it’s not the point. Moreover if they changed their scale to show the modern left is not really left wing at all, then they would not be representing what we’re seeing, and critically, they would not be shareable as a demonstration of bias in news. Because most people would dismiss them as propaganda without really digging in.

Well see that's the problem. They're lying to gain mass appeal. They're calling liberals leftists and participating in the move of the Overton window in America towards fascism. That's bad. You figured out the problem all by yourself, you didn't need me to explain it for you.

Sponsor block x new pipe and its not a problem

It very much is still a problem. It's unrealistic to expect the majority of YT users to use a tool like SponsorBlock.

Where did you get yours? I have Newpipe, but I'm having a hard time finding the version with sponsor block? Is it called Tubular now?

I switched to Pipepipe from Newpipe because I wasn't sure Newpipe was being maintained. Pipepipe has SponsorBlock.

I do think we should normalize scrutinizing the sponsors for their shittiness, but not necessarily the content creator. They are just trying to pay the bills, and aren't going to be aware of the problems with every company out there (though nearly every product that uses YouTubers for marketing is a scam in some way or other)

I don’t think just trying to pay the bills is an acceptable excuse for not doing more research before signing a contract.

I’ve got bills to pay, can I go mug my neighbour. Now I’m not sure how long Better Help have had a contract with Veritasium, but it’s been known for some time they’re shady at best.

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No. It's their channel and they can do whatever they want, just as how you can handle yourself however you want. Just do as you've done and remove yourself from something that conflicts with your opinion and everyone's happy. Life is often that simple