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.
pretty sure his video about Charmin flushable wipes being the only actually flushable wipes on the planet was bullshit
Yeah
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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Veritasium is YouTube propaganda
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.
Sponsor block x new pipe and its not a problem
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.
It very much is still a problem. It’s unrealistic to expect the majority of YT users to use a tool like SponsorBlock.
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.
maybe follow the conversation before you tell me what my own words mean.
—surprised more communities don’t care about it
—most people don’t know anything about itmeaning 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.
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.
no worries
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.
is this a bot
no
then what is that nonsense supposed to be
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.
Right. You have to scroll quite a way to see something other than him being called out.
That seems unlikely considering contracts and legal stuff
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)
That line of thought justifies all kinds of corruption.
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.
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’m out of the loop, what did Better Help do?
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
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
The “BetterHelp” YouTube Virus is BACK
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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
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)
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
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.
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.
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.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.
I don’t watch any video that’s sponsored by Ground News, and I complain in the comments
What’s wrong with ground news?
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.
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.
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:
I’ve been seeing a lot of ground news links with improbable numbers. I’m beginning to doubt their conceit.
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.
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.
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”
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.
that’s every mainstream news in the US. All of them.
Yes.
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
