Animal cruelty or even dangerous situations with animals – videos of these have become an integral part of social media. Videos of animal rescues are also booming. You're torn when you look at pictures like this: Will the animal make it? Will the rescuers arrive in time to help? Will things end well?
Just recently I talked to my mother about it, she was critical and said: “I don't understand why people always have to film everything.
If an animal is in need, I don't pick up my cell phone and make a video, then I'll help!” And she's right. Unfortunately, these animal rescue videos are in most cases staged situations.
It's about money!
Reports about YouTube as a platform for animal cruelty content have been around for years. , “Wired” alerted YouTube to 28 channels with obviously staged animal rescue videos and animal cruelty content.
The channels often contain stolen videos, some of which come from real animal protection organizations. Some of the channels make money through advertising, ask for donations via PayPal or sell merchandising items such as T-shirts.
“Lady Freethinker”, a non-profit animal protection organization, analyzed around 2,000 of the fake animal rescue videos on YouTube between May and June 2020. These have been viewed more than a billion times. This could have earned the YouTubers behind these videos around $15 million and the company behind them more than $12 million in advertising revenue. The study results can be found HERE .
From the independent researcher umbi, reporters received a list of more than 2,000 YouTube channels that also contained staged rescues, stolen videos and fake animal shelters with questionable payment information. Here the researcher was also able to see that several channels were probably operated by the same masterminds because the same PayPal information was used.
Deleting is not a final solution
In the meantime, YouTube is said to have deleted almost all of these channels. However, this does not eliminate the problem.
Videos are often copied, re-uploaded and thus further distributed. So if the original account that first published a video is deleted, the content will still remain online.
The design of the videos aims to bring in as much money as possible. Preview images are edited in a dramatic manner, often with a lot of blood visible. Harmless posts are presented in a more violent manner due to the way they are presented.
YouTube bans staged animal rescues
On June 30, YouTube announced a ban on staged animal rescues, which falls under its violent or cruel content guidelines. In order to take action against uploaded videos, human examiners and machine learning should be used.
The obvious search term “animal rescue” actually produces fewer results. However, if you try using “poor puppy ,” you will still end up with cruel posts that have been uploaded in the last few months, reports the Standard .
This again calls YouTube's ban into question. Nina Jackel from Lady Freethinker commented:
“Announcing a ban on fake bailouts is a promising first step, but efforts to date appear to be largely ineffective. I hope YouTube takes meaningful action to completely eliminate this cruel content.”
You might also be interested in: WhatsApp, YouTube, Instagram more popular than Facebook and Twitter
Source: Standard , Wired , Lady Freethinker
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