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.
Veratasium had some similar issue a few years ago too, didn’t he?
There was a video he did on a startup taxi service using self driving cars. Basically the entire thing was an advertisement for that company.
Then another Youtuber, Tom Nicholas, released a video about that a few months later and how it’s an issue. I’ll have to watch it again as I don’t remember what he specifically talks about.I recall Tom Nichols making a video on them and also perhaps an incorrect video about electricity so probably.
On the electricity video, he was actually correct. It was mostly a matter of semantics and people clinging to the common models of electricity.
His video with one of those “genetic research” companies was very bad anti-privacy propaganda, where they used the excuse of catching the Golden State Killer as justification for storing and using the related genetic information of masses of unconsenting individuals.
He’s also dipped several times into making state department propaganda like Smarter Every Day consistently does. Not nearly quite as bad as him yet though.
And he’s made several videos about failures of capitalism, wherein he very obviously refuses to identify it as the problem. Like the one about planned obsolescence or leaded gasoline and another I’m forgetting.
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?
Tim Dillon used to do that all the time.
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.
Dr becky (atrology channel) also did a few sponsorships with them and got lots of unhappy comments under those videos. Not sure if she still sticks with them or no. Aaaaaaaand I just checked her last video from 7 hours ago and she still gets sponsorships from them. Top comments are asking her to stop accepting those sponsorships pointing out their doings.
I watch basically any channel with 100,000+ subscribers through Piped so that my views or retention or engagement don’t get counted by YouTube.
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.
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.
As a parent of two kids on the spectrum my messaging has been just this with a resounding “there are legions of autistic people that are NOT represented. Ever.”
Every representation of autistic people you see in the media, or chatting with online are the exception and the fact that they collectively shit on the fact that there are many isolated and struggling is goddamn frustrating.
If you’re autistic and on Lemmy I’m proud of you. My youngest son can’t manage his own diabetes, can’t wipe his ass, needs help showering, has worsening anxiety and ADHD. I could go on.
As a parent I’m supposed to defer to that representation in the media or on Lemmy because “they’re autistic bro.” disgusts me.
My final takeaway. Fuck the DSM V for making Asperger’s the same as Autism. It isn’t. It hurts both parties but I’d argue it hurts Autistic people far more than Asperger’s people.
Thanks for raising this, I get attacked here if I ever point out autism is a disability. I can only assume these people have literally never met anyone with anything but the mildest of Aspergers cases.
lol all that just to finish with a definitive statement about autism. Asperger’s has always been an aspect of autism. Dr. Asperger was a Nazi scientist, responsible for deciding who among the neurodivergent would go to the gas chambers. the patients that he deemed to have “mild enough” autism to be used for labor, were called “Asperger’s”.
Thanks for sharing your experience. It sounds like you have your hands full and as a parent I can only empathize. I totally hear you about media representation missing the mark. We have some roadway to make. I’m surprised how many parent friends we have that are relatively clueless (even though I must admit, until this January when we got the diagnosis I was too).
My little one started group therapy about two months ago and I’m super grateful even though the journey ahead is still quite long.
On the Asperger’s topic: I was under the impression Asperger’s is no longer in use as a diagnosis and was folded into the ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder). At least that’s what we learned this year throughout the diagnosis process.
Stay strong brother (or sister)!
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.
that advert is terrifying, what the hell
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.
After that video with a military defense company, I stopped following his videos
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.
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.
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.
Well, that does make some sense. I swear some of the channels who have these sponsorships are the same channels that had them last time around too.
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.
Slightly relevant, install firefox and sponsorblock (works on mobile)
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?
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
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 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.
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 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.
pretty sure his video about Charmin flushable wipes being the only actually flushable wipes on the planet was bullshit
