Disinformation Prone YouTube Genres
Not just a pet peeve, it's a national security hazard, too.
Have you or someone you know been subjected to this nonsense?
Apparently there are a portion of internet users who actually tolerate advertising. I’m the diametric opposite, I know I occasionally mention that I’m on the autism spectrum, and “sense defense” is part of that. I basically stopped watching TV in my late teens - the periodic interruption of a good story with someone yelling at me to buy stuff is roughly as pleasant as a crying baby. I’ve never owned a TV in my adult life, never paid for a cable plan for any reason other than cable modem access, and I pretty much missed a lot of American culture from the mid-1980s until Blockbuster started offering things like Six Feet Under.
So this was no big deal until about a month ago, the mighty Adblock extension shut out the noise, and I went a step further by keeping a hardcore channel blocker. Adblock is still doing its duty, albeit with periodic stumbles, but the blocker developer gave up. And that’s a HUGE problem for me, and it reveals a problem for society.
Quality Control:
I could just pay the subscription rate for YouTube. It’s generally open in a tab and there are a few genres that I follow. These include:
News - BBC, CBC, CNN, DW, France 24
Military History - Drachinifel, Ed Nash, Mark Felton, Military History Visualized
Animal stuff - Animalogic, BBC Earth, etc
Astrophysics - Astrum, Dr. Becky, PBS Space Time
OK, so it’s more than a few genres, but you get the picture. Actual human presenters going deep into topics, those circumscribed interests autists enjoy.
Insufferable Shite:
Here are some things that I used to immediately punish with a whole channel block.
Anything with INSANE or TERRIFYING in the title, it’s almost universal junk.
Any click bait “You probably shouldn’t watch this” titles also got channel bans.
Watching one local crime story does not mean I want every city’s crime beat.
Stealing clips of wildlife documentaries and photoshopping a gory thumbnail does NOT make one a creator.
And this is where the trouble starts - AI posing as knowledgeable humans. A better automated voice than one would have heard two years ago, but still somewhat stilted, and as someone who pays attention to military acquisitions in general and the B-52 in particular there’s a lot in this video that is just plain WRONG.
Drone news is a rich source of artificial voices reading AI created scripts that SOUND right … unless you know something about the field.
And FSM preserve you if you have need to research a medical condition. The ratio of supplement pushing grifters to actual expertise seems to be at least 5:1, and I’m pretty hardened in this area. I have a cluster of serious post Lyme sequelae, I read journal articles on the topic, I have a doctor friend on LinkedIn who will humor me when I have complex “it depends” questions … just imagine what someone with limited education and resources might be induced to buy.
Conclusion:
A month ago I could instantly and permanently punish bullshit purveyors. Today, as I’ve been writing this, it seems like my blocks from that now dead extension are still in force, and I could maybe be convinced that as part of YouTube’s forced subscription campaign they are squeezing out the junk AI channels.
Am I looking at anything new? Nope, there’s too much trash blowing in the wind on YouTube. And if I click on one POS the algo will offer me six dozen more just like it. If I were a legitimate content producer on that platform I would be FURIOUS over this. If you can’t even get that first watch, you won’t get the second, and that engagement ladder from viewer to comment maker to subscriber is DOA.
Now imagine a high school junior working on an essay about current affairs. Does the U.S. have the requisite media literacy to avoid such troubles? I would say that not only do we lack that, we’re constitutionally incapable of developing it … due to our Constitution. Any attempt at sticking to objective reality will run smack into the sort of “freeze peach” loons responsible for Qanon, anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, supply side economics, and other collective forms of insanity.
Twitter, as far as being a global common, has been disintegrating since the day Musk took over. YouTube’s revenue effort, which is understandable, has the same effect because it deprives viewers of the ability to do their own quality control.
Project ahead a year … ChatGPT5 is out, the voice mimic tools that do David Attenborough are generalized, and we’ll be on the edge of AI generated avatars that are plausible enough to fool a lot of viewers.
Malign influence operator X creates popular YouTube channel Y and uses it to A/B test and then deliver manipulative content for hostile foreign power Z.
The U.S. is incapable of countering this - the pathological liars that have congregated under the Libertarian banner will squeal endlessly about freedom of speech … right up to the day we no longer have it. We’re tottering on the edge of this now and global technology companies have already been able to self-emancipate in many situations.
Conditions remind me of the early nuclear years, when the six megaton Castle Bravo thermonuclear test produced a startling fifteen megaton blast. What we don’t (yet) know about AI could be far more dangerous.
Addendum:
Wrote this a few days ago, queued it up for Monday morning, and started paying attention to what this new YouTube was offering me. Ships, armor, airplanes? Check. Cats, primates, dinosaurs? Check. Can you make any inferences based on the rest of these images? They’re trying so SoOoOoOo hard to get my attention, no?
OK, this last one has the most overt soft core pr0n with this chick in the white, but the other three are fine. Not interested in Ms. Nose Job, Danielle Dufaut, in the Tiger Army tank, is a regular presenter for Animalogic, and this politics thing with the purple hair lady who’s my age isn’t gonna get watched, but it’s not annoying.