HN Explorer

Tell HN: Someone seems to be trying to make people more fearful through YouTube

91 points by santah ↗ HN
I run https://next-episode.net (a TV tracking service).

As part of my maintenance routine and on a daily basis - I look for newly released trailers for the most popular upcoming shows.

A weird pattern I noticed through the years are rogue YouTube channels like this one:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-VJ2EpzBRQMJYLO1fV1X3g/vid...

(I've stumbled upon 5-6 channels EXACTLY like this one - same channel and video naming pattern, approximately the same number of videos, just for different shows)

Check out 2-3 random trailers. Notice anything out of place?

Each and every one of these seemingly innocent TV show trailers have a short video stitched before the actual trailer (and sometimes after as well).

These stitched videos are always scary news reports about people being attacked, robbed or murdered.

The choice of shows to upload trailers for seems random at first, but if you look closer - those are all relatively obscure and niche shows with fairly small following.

To me - it looks like it's a concerted effort by some entity to try and raise (certain?) peoples fears?

I'm not sure who or why would be doing this, but I thought it might be a good idea to expose this here for some discussion and further investigation?

32 comments

[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 77.2 ms ] thread
gpas
Nice find. Seems like something created by a script. Show descriptions scraped from imdb, the trailers too I guess. I watched some and the crime featured in the news was perpetrated by black people... Also the first has the title wrong, Quad instead of Adam, this led me to think about automation. But the Hot Wheels one has a news report about a teen hijacking a car, automated or not, that seems done on purpose.
nanna
> was perpetrated by black people.

Black people were accused. Big difference.

Bancakes
You can literally see in the Quad trailer of a PoC beating a woman.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
ManlyBread
To me it seems like trolling, perhaps this is targeted at a specific niche community?
nanna
More fearful of black men.

I've clicked through ten if these so far and every single one involves black men accused of violent crime.*

Whether or not the intention is so, the effect is clearly to charge racist fears.

* Update: Twenty, and one of a black woman. This is clearly a racist channel and it should not have reached the front page of HN.

RicoElectrico
> should not have reached the front page of HN.

I don't understand - OP is merely describing (and raising awareness of) shady manipulation tactics.

Do we not recognize use-mention distinction or what?

nanna
OP has completely mistitled this link. It should be something like, 'Collection of videos to make white people fearful of blacks'.

If you stumbled across a channel that video after video depicts Jews stealing and hoarding money you'd call it antisemitic, and it would be very strange for that collection to be linked to on the front page of HN.

santah
I don't believe this is just a collection of videos.

To me - it rather looks like a purposeful bait and switch manipulation targeted at people who search for TV show trailers on YouTube with the intention to influence them (and as you said - "make them fearful of blacks").

As I mentioned - I've stumbled upon other channels doing the exact same thing following the same formula.

I don't think it's just racist people who happened to upload such videos.

Also, I kinda wonder - what other niches they may be doing this in? TV trailers may be only one of many such niches they target ...

gpas
Reminds me of elsagate. Similar technique, different target and purpose.
the_only_law
What was the purpose? I recall hearing / reading / watching about it and lots of fun theories but never anything concrete.
Shish2k
So… you want channels like this one to continue spreading round the internet without anybody questioning their legitimacy?

I’m not sure what your actual point is here. “Here’s a practical example of a shady actor using bots to spread bad stuff over a big-tech platform while remaining low-level enough to fly under their radar” seems fairly on-brand to me.

[dead] s9w
Right, because showing actual crimes is racist if the offender is not white
notahacker
The niche shows might simply be because the bigger budget ones DMCA them (or there's too much competition in search to make them worth it).

The agenda to promote fears of black people seems pretty obvious.

ALittleLight
From your description I thought it would be ad fraud - basically someone sticking autogenerated videos together on channels to make their bots watch them to hopefully get their videos recommended and make ad revenue. After watching 10 (just the beginning) I no longer think that's right (but it still might be a component).

As another commenter mentioned the criminals in the news stories all seem to be black men. There are also news stories at the end too, at least on some. The "actual" or purported content doesn't even seem to be trailers necessarily so much as random clips from the movie or show. It's not edited together like a trailer, at least from the ones I watched.

Someone has a large collection of news reports to find a variety of violent black criminals. That probably means they are putting these together manually? Mental illness? Strange.

nanna
Honestly HN, I really fear for the community's inability to see this channel for what it is. It's not mental illness it's white supremacy. Call a spade a spade. Do people here not know the history of framing blacks, and especially black men, as criminals, and it's legacy in slavery? The 13th Amendment? Seriously?
ALittleLight
A white supremacist whose MO is joining news clips to clips of niche TV shows? Mental illness seems more plausible to me, even if part of the mental illness is making the person racist. It's an illogical thing to do that takes a lot of effort.

A racist behaving rationally might just put the news clips together and or add commentary and sensational titles. They might put their clips on popular movies or new trailers so more people would watch. They might make shorter clips in the middle of the trailer, because, as is, putting the news clips at the start means anyone looking for the trailer will just bounce on seeing something else.

Surely there is a history of racism and obviously there is a racial element to this, as I identified in my previous comment, but the bizarre and irrational nature of it makes me think it's either automated fraud or mental illness. Also, I don't understand the relationship between this and framing black people for crimes, as far as I could tell the video clips are real clips from the news about black people committing crimes.

guerrilla
> It's an illogical thing to do that takes a lot of effort.

It's completely logical. You get people to click on trailer videos and they see this instead. They want to expose people to these and that's a way to do it. Have you missed the last decade of 4chan racist trolling or something? They do stuff like this all the time.

donclark
Could this also be done via AI or other means to auto-magically select/cut/stitch the videos together?
guerrilla
You could just do it with a bash script and ffmpeg or something if you already have the collection.
xtiansimon
These ‘artifacts’ are certainly very strange semantically (if you consider everything on the internet is what the label says it is).

While the juxtaposition is referentially alarming, and has a pattern, that does not prove the nature of the intent as racist. In other words the seemingly easy pattern for the auditor/audience could also be an easy formula for the maker—especially if it were a bot.

Does anyone know the state of the art for auto-editing and related auto-labeling to say that such content would be easy for a bot to assemble. An easy—excuse the expression— ‘toy’ example?

Not knowing much about the domain, but I also imagine this content could also be manually edited experiment for labeling experiments?

Relatedly, I recall early Twitterbot experiments. They were usually silly, strange, and all had a clearly detectable conceit.

I’m still subscribed to one called Archillect (https://twitter.com/archillect). Early days I recall most images were very dark—both monochromatic and thematically. Their "art" would be the subjective evaluation of a visual with it's interpretation ('being' and 'seeming' dark both visually and thematically--lots of anime or high-tech, and not much 'nature').

I’m not saying this isn’t the work of a @$$h@l3.

EDIT: edited my description of Archillect as artistic experiment.

kypro
Channels which used to report on black on white crime have started to be removed from YouTube over the last couple of years so I suspect they're now looking for less explicit ways to post this type of content.
VoodooJuJu
> To me - it looks like it's a concerted effort by some entity to try and raise (certain?) peoples fears

Which certain peoples? Did it raise your fears? Which type person are you?

SwiftyBug
Could it be a form of retaliation to the BLM movement? All the stitched videos are news about crimes committed by black men.
koolk3ychain
I strongly believe that in the next four to five years a majority of the content on the platform will be machine generated. It's fascinating how many military weapons history / "news" channels are almost 100% voiced by machines and placed over public domain gov't produced video of the navy / airforce [0].

Always very interesting to see the kinds of audio / video dithering used to defeat the YouTube algorithm!

0 - https://www.youtube.com/c/MilitaryUpdate/videos

Hoenoe
I'm shocked how people who are correctly formulating this as an attempt to frame black people a criminals and to scare white people are down voted! Open your eyes people! And if you care about your fellow humans, please report it
sparkling
Not sure of these are being automatically generated by a script or someone is manually editing and uploading them

On the one hand the video title patterns seem to not be formated consistency. But then all the thumbnails seem like a script is fetching images off Google and stretching them to 16:9 aspect ratio

In any case, nice find.

gt565k
Reported the channel to youtube.

Let's see what they say.

auganov
There is actually a non-trailer video on the channel and it happens to be "Muslim Somalian Refugee attack 60 Minutes Journalist Reporters in Sweden". Seems to confirm OP's hunch. Hard to come up with a scenario in which the same script would put that one and all the others up. Didn't review all of them but the news clips in trailer videos seem pretty different. Doubt this would be the script erroring out and uploading just the first part.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=r6UgjgCSbf8

simplemen
Is it just me or do others also feel raised blood pressure, tingling in forearms, and other physical symptoms after watching violent videos?

These disturbing videos can kill my productivity for hours.