YouTube is awful - The sexual harassment genre.

[Aldurin]

I don't usually make these kinds of threads because I don't actually stick my arms in the mud that much. I stay away from the clickbait, shallow stuff and "shit on display" discussions, hell the only txt twitter I follow is @forexposure_txt since it's mostly bad business instead of the pit of despair that the others are. So I was also really unaware of just how successful some people have been on YouTube with videos themed around sexual harassment.

So I just saw this video that one of my RL friends shared and I'm still trying to take it in. Never heard of Laci Green before but she's definitely cool she has many strong opinions of varied quality. But I could barely watch the clips in there from the people she's calling out.



I like the internet, I really do. But boy does it make it challenging to like it when all of the awful people in the world can find their own echo chamber regardless of distance. And it's brought a few things to my attention that I didn't think were that bad.
1. The people making these videos around "pranks" on women aren't being arrested for what anyone should realize is something really awful. I can only hope that most of their cut footage is of them having to back off because either a the target or a heroic passerby managed to intimidate them away, but I could be and probably am wrong to hope that.
2. The popularity of these videos indicates that the "women should yield to men" portion of the voices of the world are far more numerous than I imagined. I figured before that it was the largest of the terrible vocal minorities, but still very thinly spread. I'm realizing that's probably egregious understatement.
3. These videos aren't being taken down by YouTube until they become so prominent in the media that they're taking it down if only to not look bad. I just expected in the past that content this bad would be flagged and removed relatively quickly.
4. These people make a living by sexually assaulting women and showing it to the world for others to laugh at. As with YouTube, Sam Pepper's monetization network only dropped him after this became an issue from what I can tell, which means that they're just dodging bad PR instead of actively policing their own partnered channels to keep this stuff out.

This is probably just preaching to the quire for most of this forum, but this video is good for pointing out not just the problem, but the scale of it. Run it by your friends that might need help grasping this issue.

[Aerozord]

I hate to say it but truth is the solution is, ignore it and it will go away. Like you said if you spread news about it than it becomes click-bait. Lots of youtube channels and websites make their money by farming off the hatred of others. There are other things that can be done, can inform people of influence like advertisers or government of the genre but thats abit of a calculated move. I bet most of these people are perfectly content with this ballooning in a media storm, making their cash, than bursting.

Only real way to discourage a youtube trend is to avoid it, dont search for it, dont click it, and dont give others a reason to do the same. This kind of thing is apart of "there is no bad PR"

[Aldurin]

Originally Posted by Aerozord

I hate to say it but truth is the solution is, ignore it and it will go away. Like you said if you spread news about it than it becomes click-bait. Lots of youtube channels and websites make their money by farming off the hatred of others. There are other things that can be done, can inform people of influence like advertisers or government of the genre but thats abit of a calculated move. I bet most of these people are perfectly content with this ballooning in a media storm, making their cash, than bursting.

Only real way to discourage a youtube trend is to avoid it, dont search for it, dont click it, and dont give others a reason to do the same. This kind of thing is apart of "there is no bad PR"

I don't think that is the case, since they get by on the viewership of people who don't know or don't care that this kind of content is wrong. Seeking out these problems may affect their viewership, but it's effective as long as the situation is brought to light.

The "ignore it and it will go away" strategy wouldn't have caused Sam Pepper to have his videos flagged for policy violations and for him to be dropped from his partnered network, because from their world everything would have been fine as long as the viewership ad money came in and the bad PR didn't happen.

Any sort of problem where people are obliviously or actively promoting sexism or racism has to be actively countered, whether through raising awareness among the oblivious or effectively discrediting and punish those who willingly are part of the problem. The idea of passively solving a problem only encourages the mindset that your effort isn't needed to make the world a better place, when it actually is.

[Aerozord]

I said for "US" to do. That wasn't us, that was a partnered network and google enforcing their policies.

This is media, be it love or hatred both feed it. What kills media is apathy, realizing its not worth mentioning. I mean I didn't even know this existed, now if I was curious and checked it out, there thats a few more views. They are more than happy to take the free advertisement.

[edit]sorry if that came out mean-spirited. feeling abit agitated. I agree, be against it, just not sure this is the best way to fight it.

[Aldurin]

Originally Posted by Aerozord

I said for "US" to do. That wasn't us, that was a partnered network and google enforcing their policies.

This is media, be it love or hatred both feed it. What kills media is apathy, realizing its not worth mentioning. I mean I didn't even know this existed, now if I was curious and checked it out, there thats a few more views. They are more than happy to take the free advertisement.

[edit]sorry if that came out mean-spirited. feeling abit agitated. I agree, be against it, just not sure this is the best way to fight it.

There are ways to fight against this. One thing is secondhand exposure to the problem, which can avoid the complication of increasing their viewership statistics (like with the video I posted in the first post, which uses footage from videos that are part of the problem, but that video itself is acting as part of the solution through awareness). You don't have to directly show MLP fanporn to a parent to convince them that their 8-year old daughter who is a fan of the show should be carefully discouraged from looking up MLP content, as awareness through secondhand accounts/exposure can sufficient enough to get the point across. Firsthand exposure is only necessary if you want to be directly in the fight, or understanding the finer details of the debate/conflict in process.

Second is that apathy doesn't affect the standard online business model so simply. A starting channel/account/business will surely die if they can't overcome the apathy problem, since if no one cares then no one cares to mention to anyone else, which leads to no reputation that can help bolster advertising returns. But one that is already stabilized with at least six-digit regular viewership (Sam Pepper is over 2.3 million subscribers, which is well past the minimum point needed to sustain monetization of a partnered YouTube account) can get away with being apathetic to the apathy portion of their potential audience, as their existing actual audience sustains enough long-term viewers while maintaining a positive viewers gained versus viewers lost.

Basically, it's the idea of "I won't shop at Walmart because of their business practices" or "I use less paper to lessen the impact on deforestation" or similar situations where someone who says they are fighting a problem are merely distancing themselves from it. Walmart doesn't care if a person chooses not to shop at their stores, as they already sustain themselves by pushing closer to monopolizing the retail industry and their existing base of regular shoppers. Sure, it's lost profit from the money you're not giving them, but the only loss is lost opportunity of having another customer. If not having every potential customer as a customer actually hurt a business significantly, then monopolization would be the default and competition would have to wage all-out war against each other to remove their competitor before both sides financially bleed out and bankrupt. Using less paper sounds good environmentally, but a few people doing it won't visibly affect the demand from the logging companies who will continue working and supplying at the same rate as before.

The only way that form of protest can actually work is if you organize enough people close to or within a business' active audience base to be on board with this. A dozen people who don't subscribe to a multi-million subscriber Youtube channel don't matter to the channel owner, but if a significant percentage of their subscriber base unsubscribes and spreads a case for why others should do so, it will damage their revenue stream enough that they will have to make changes to how they operate that channel if they want to recover from that. The apathy treatment is only effective in large scale, but can't be grown from external apathy.

But this is a very complicated issue to get into, and these optimal scenarios for making this solution work can ask for a lot of commitment for people who don't want to drop the rest of their life to focus on fighting a specific problem. And the above stuff is my general understanding of how that problem can be addressed, but it doesn't give a sure path to me or anyone else of how to deal with it.

[rpgdemon]

Yeah, you really can't just ignore someone with 2.4 million people watching and absorbing what they say as good, and assume they'll go away.

Especially when he's pretty much raped a bunch of women, according to the stories in the video above. There's no way that you can excuse an opinion of, "Ignore that."

[Marc v4.0]

"Just ignore it and it will go away" doesn't really hold any damn weight as a tactic of combat considering a fair amount of people didn't know this was going on and, now this is key, IT WAS STILL HAPPENING ANYWAY.

[pochercoaster]

Okay, so I just watched the video. Wow.

<irrelevant> if a guy managed to get close enough to me to handcuff me, he would promptly get thrown on the ground and have his windpipe stepped upon. hard.<irrelevant>

Tangential: This shit isn't really surprising to me since sexual harassment has always been a thing, whether or not it's on camera. The most recent incident where I was groped was when a customer grabbed my breasts while I was at work (about a year ago). The store manager gave the customer a stern talking to, but didn't ban him, so every time I see this customer in the store I have to go in the back to calm down because it's a struggle to contain my anger at him. It's also seriously coloured my perception of upper management at my job.

The only difference between the shitbags who grope women (on public transit, at work, at bars, or just any time they don't have their fuckin' consent) and this guy is that this guy records it on camera. And, you know, I generally say the kind of people grope women are opportunists and try to do it when other people aren't looking or they've set up some kind of situation where they have an excuse for their behaviour, because they're aware that what they're doing is wrong and don't want to get caught, but this guy is brazen enough to videotape it. And you know what? He fuckin got away with it because he knows people are ignorant enough to not see what's wrong with it.

So, this behaviour is clearly disgusting and symptomatic of a sexist culture where consent isn't considered important, especially when it's women's consent, because women aren't seen as full human beings that exist outside of fulfilling men's sexual desires.

Yeah, no, ignoring this shit in the hopes it will go away is, sorry to be blunt, plainly stupid. Most people are only peripherally aware of sexism and rape culture, if they're aware of it at all. It's a hugely complex issue and needs to be talked about constantly to counter the media's dominant tendency to be passive with these issues. Ignoring it is enabling it. We have to name the behaviour, why it's wrong, and tell people to stop doing it. We can't ignore it or, worse, treat it like it's an inevitability. This does not have to be the default way we treat women.

Edit: Like, this isn't "media." This isn't a "youtube trend." This is sexism, something you find in every corner of our culture- in this particular case, it took the form of a youtube trend, but sexism isn't inherent to youtube trends, and it's wrong to paint it that way.

[Solid Snake]

...Fuck my life, this isn't what I needed to see to start my day today. Faith in humanity is now dipping into negative integers.

(Though I guess the fact these assholes are finally receiving negative attention is a blessing of a sort.)

Also, did Sam Peppers seriously attempt a "This was really about me exposing a relatively rare form of abuse against privileged individuals by sexually abusing far more likely victims of sexual abuse in a completely unrelated manner and then assuming you'd all somehow make the connection that I was criticizing completely unrelated conduct despite the fact that that leap in logic makes absolutely no fucking sense and, even if it did make sense, would not justify me committing actual criminal offenses to prove said point" defense?
...Like, that was actually a thing that happened?

I don't know what's more shocking, the fact that he thought anyone might actually buy that explanation as a justification for his atrocious conduct, or the fact that his sorry ass isn't rotting in a jail cell.

[Kim]

"Ignore it and it will go away" is the argument of the entitled, because it is true for them. If you don't talk about it, it goes away for them since it doesn't affect them, and they can pretend women aren't still being groped and raped by abusive men.