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.
Mark Rober was a big disappointment too. he made a pretty weird video about autism, using the fact that his son is autistic as like qualification for him to talk about it. autistic folks tried to talk to him about the problematic nature of the video in the comments, and he just blocked them. plus, he partnered with NXT for Autism, which does work with Autism Speaks, which is genuinely a hate group that's trying to exterminate autism, and, last I checked, had no autistic people on the board.
After that video with a military defense company, I stopped following his videos
As a parent of a child with Level 1 autism I would never dare speak as an authority on the subject. There's just so much nuance to it. I could give people a surface level introduction but that's it. Being a parent does not make people by default into expert psychotherapists.
That being said, don't discount your expertise in your lived experience. The importance of theoretical and experiential expertise is equal in my eyes.
Maybe not directly correlated, but I would hire someone with 10 years experience over someone who studied the subject for 10 years.
Try to understand that influencers and content creators are human beings and not infallible. I don’t think Mark or Derek are the greatest people in the world, but they are trying to put educational and entertaining content out into the world, and don’t seem to be malicious in intent.
Give them a break and see where they land down the road. If they turn out to be trash, judge em all you want. As someone that doesn’t spend the time and effort to pass my experience on to others, I’ll give them a bit of wiggle room on the politics associated with operating in the public attention economy.
lol no. he had a chance, when we tried to have a reasonable conversation with him. his views on autism suck, he partnered with a bad actor, and he muted people who tried to talk to him about it. that's three different problems.
Yes, they're not infallible. That's why they should be held to account for their actions. You're the one saying to treat them like they make no mistakes.
Haha. That would be too sensible.
made a pretty weird video about autism, using the fact that his son has it as like qualification for him to talk about it. folks with autism tried to talk to him about the problematic nature of the video in the comments, and he just blocked them.
So typical Autism Parent™ then lol it's like they can't help but make it about themselves.. 🙄
As a parent of 2 children on the spectrum I need to give you a well thought out "fuck you" in response.
My experience online is a lot of you "champions" for autism are only speaking for yourselves and those like you, which is to say the ones that have some means of independence be it verbally, physically or emotionally. I have one son like that. He's Asperger's. He will have challenges, but he will live a long and productive life with all the proper tools. My other son is your "traditional" autistic. He is thankfully verbal but at this point there is no plan for him to be independent ever. As parents we hope for the best and take every day at a time.
To assume that our opinions and decisions are derived as "making about ourselves" is part of the problem. Everything I have done since his birth has been to NOT make it about myself.
The last thing I need is people like you punching down because you can't look past your own goddamn nose.
he's not talking about parents of autistic children. he's talking about parents of autistic children who make that their main personality trait, walking around referring to themselves as "autistic moms", intentionally using confusing language so you can't tell if they're autistic, or if their child is autistic. sort of like Munchausen by Proxy but you don't have to fake it
Oh yeah those parents who make it their identity are weird AF.
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’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.
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
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.
I feel like this wasn't even that long ago? I was quite surprised when my content suddenly started being sponsored by them again.
I had that same reaction. It actually happened around 2018 (where does the time go?)
https://www.polygon.com/2018/10/4/17932862/betterhelp-app-youtube-sponsorship-controversy-explained
We've definitely been here before. One of the interesting things about this article is that a lot of the videos they embedded are gone now.
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.
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. 🤷
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.
pretty sure his video about Charmin flushable wipes being the only actually flushable wipes on the planet was bullshit
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.
That seems unlikely considering contracts and legal stuff
Right. You have to scroll quite a way to see something other than him being called out.
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
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 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 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.
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.
I don't watch any video that's sponsored by Ground News, and I complain in the comments
What's wrong with ground news?
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.
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