"Extra extra, read all about it! Five
Nights at Freddy's franchise bought by Disney!
Full cinematic universe plan!
Negan spin-off series coming for the
walking dead! Marvel vs DC movie plan for
2022! Former reality TV host elected president!"
Man, really can't believe
anything you read these days can you?"
"Hello internet, welcome to Film Theory!
Where today, a show dedicated to
concocting half-baked theories about
movies and TV, is talking about the
mainstream media lying to you.
In other words, we finally reached theory
level conspiracy!
Let's face it, 2016's biggest theme and
media, both television and online, was the
issue of click baiting. Coming up with
over-the-top hyperbolic extreme
headlines, and a shameless attempt to get
people to click. But that's nothing new, it's
always been around you say. But what used
to be just a mild annoyance, took on a
really sinister tone this year. As
clickbait gave way to it's far more
dangerous - relative - fake news. Websites
and newspapers blatantly lying to you,
and then passing it off as fact, just to
get a headline that gets you to click.
It's been an especially hot topic in the
aftermath of the presidential election,
where the news is now being blamed for
swaying voters, suppressing voters, creating
scandals, and worst of all, outright lying
about simple, INDISPUTABLE facts. Like
which candidate got more votes! Seriously,
do you for a hundred percent certainty
know who got more votes in this year's
election? According to the headlines, it's
been flipping back and forth for weeks.
And when you can't get a straight answer
on something as objective as how many
people voted for the leader of the free
world, then you've got yourself a problem.
Probably the most high-profile example
of this was facebook, getting hammered
over election stories appearing in
people's news feeds that had nothing to
do with the facts. So you don't even have
to look to headlines that big for fake
news. Despite these fear-mongering
articles from supposedly reliable news
sources, you're not going to get Lyme
disease from your christmas tree, the
White House did not ban nativity
scenes from their christmas decorations,
and Fidel Castro was, shock of all shocks,
not a professional baseball star. Now for
all you new theorists subscribed to the
channel, it's our annual tradition near the
end of the year on both game and film
theory to end with a meta theory a state
of the union address about a major theme
of the year, trend in the industry that you need
to know about.
So, why should you care about this
episode when you're here for another
disney conspiracy, or to tell me that I
was wrong about rogue one, or to
complain about Doctor Who part 3, still
not being uploaded. Well one, most
importantly because this is real life
and not some fictional movie, and two,
because we're all the targets.
You, me, your family, my family, your
friends, my... cat, because misleading you
is big business. And you deserve to be
informed of how everything from the
evening news, to your local newspaper, to
online blogs is attempting to manipulate
the way that you think, and by extension,
the way that you act. Actually have a
couple other theories related to this
one that are specifically about YouTube,
that are over on the game theorists
channel right now, so if you haven't seen
those, click here to check them out. So also
be links at the end of the video. And if
you're loyal game theorists coming from
over there,
welcome, my arms are open to you. The
theories are just as depressing on this
side of the internet. Now go ahead, kick
back, and get ready to never trust
anything you ever see online, ever again.
Let's call a spade a spade, 2016 was a
sucky year. It was a year full of
international crises, racial tensions,
surprising celebrity deaths, and a very,
very tense presidential election. And all
along it seemed like the media was just
going about doing their job of reporting.
But ask yourself this,
how much of what you see is real even
from the sources we consider to be the
most trusted in the world.
How is it possible, in the information
age to have false stories get treated as
fact is the whole media machine just
asleep at the wheel, or what's really
going on here? So to understand media of
today, we need to take a stroll down
memory lane. Fake news is way older than
you think, dating all the way back to the
mid eighteen hundreds, with the first
daily newspapers started being sold by
newsboys on the street corners. Think
Newsies, but with a lot less singing, and a lot
more of newspapers hiring urine-soaked
bums to shout headlines. These newsboys
literally had to shout headlines to get
people to impulse buy papers each and
every day, which meant one thing the
headlines had to be catchy. One might say
they had to be, click-baity. That's right,
click bait actually predates the click.
Once people started realizing that
exaggerated catchy
titles and fun headlines would sell more
papers on the street then cut and dry
news stories, the age of yellow
journalism began. So what's, 'yellow
journalism'?
well, if you've read facebook newsfeed
since, uhhh, since the facebook newsfeed became
a thing, then you've already probably
seen it.
Yellow journalism is quote/unquote news
that's badly researched. Mostly guesswork,
and has lots of big statements that are
supported by very little fact. Some of
the most successful papers in this era
were papers like the New York Tribune,
and the San Francisco Examiner. But what made
these papers stand out from the crowd
was the types of news stories that they
covered. You see they specialized in the
sleaze, exaggerated gory crime stories.
Stories about political scandals and
corruption. The New York Tribune became
especially successful off of it's racist
coverage, and strong anti-immigrant
stances. Sound like anything you've been
reading this year? Maybe? Sure, it doesn't
paint a pretty picture, but it definitely
sells newspapers, or in the modern case
of digital media, gets people clicking.
And from there, once people have clicked,
or bought the paper, it doesn't really
matter what the content is or whether
the headline was true or not, in fact in the
heyday of yellow journalism there were
companies who liked it better if the story
was false, because then the paper could
run an exposé, then an argument, a
rebuttal, or some sort of angry response
drawing out a clickable headline for
more and more papers on those clickable
subjects. Keeping people coming back to
stay on top of a scandal, that wouldn't
have even existed if the newspaper had
done their homework in the first place!
which begs the question, why do we have
this problem? Are reporters just bad? Are
news outlets just less selective about
the stories they run? Why are news companies
and TV networks still going if they're
clearly bad at their job of reporting
news?
Well, the reason, is that reporting news
isn't their job. They're not actually in
the news business. They're in the
advertising business. Most news companies
don't make money from the news, they make
money from the ads that are sold
alongside the news. Reporting on current
events is just filling time, giving them
content to get you to watch, and to read,
so that way you're there when the next
ad starts to slot in. These news companies
aren't making money off of the
article, they're making money off of what's
above the article, and what's next to the
article, and popping up over top of the
article, and then flashing and auto
playing in the middle of that article
Man! The internet looks completely
different when you turn off your ad
blocker. I can't understand how people can
use the internet when it looks like this. Ugh!
So step one is to stop thinking
about the blogs that you read as news
sites, because they're not, they're product
isn't news. It's advertising space. Take
this line of thought to it's logical
conclusion, and you get something that
makes a whole lot of sense when you stop
to consider it. YouTube isn't a video
platform, it's an advertising platform.
Facebook isn't a social site, it's an
advertising site that happens to have
pictures of your friends' babies to lure
you in. Google? It ain't making a whole lot of money
off of it's search engine, or the new tech
that it's producing, it's all about the ads.
According to Bloomberg businessweek $76.1
billion dollars, or around ninety percent
of Google's income, is coming off of it's
ad business. To cite a former executive
from the company, quote, 'No one wants to
face the reality that this is an
advertising company with a bunch of
hobbies.' Creating products, where it can then
place ads. And news is just a fancy word
for a genre of entertainment, stories that
may, or may not be real to get your
attention and sell some commercial
breaks in the process. But I hear you
rightfully asking, 'Is clickbait actually
doing any harm outside of being mildly
annoying? Nothing lost but a little bit
of time, right?' Wrong. It turns out that
not only does the media do a good job of
figuring out how to get people to click
on fake news, they do an even better job
of getting us to share that fake news.
One thing we've seen a lot of this year
is reaction compilations. Don't laugh,
don't cry, don't cringe, emotional response
is huge on the internet, and that applies
just as much to regular news, as it does
to YouTube. But not all reactions are
created equally.
It turns out that after a hundred and fifty
years of media coverage, news outlets
have pretty well figured out what
emotions are better at getting people to
share than others. So let's look at the
five major emotions as we've been told
by Inside Out. Any guesses as to which
one gets people to spread news the
fastest? Is it disgust, like the
pictures of redneck eighties prom photos?
Or is it happiness, like all those videos
of dogs greeting soldiers coming back
from Afghanistan.
Awe stop the clip I'm going to lose it
they get me every time! But I'm not
likely to share it because not even the
warm fuzzies can top the most powerful
emotion for fake, news anger. An
influential study of 200,000 twitter
users in China conducted, by MIT, showed
that angry posts on social media are
three times more likely to be spread
through shares or retweets, than any of
the other emotions. And if you look back
across the news this year, you can see
that it's true. Look at the top stories that
dominated headlines: racial tension,
senseless violence, people's rights being
threatened, but then look at the posts
that got the most shares. Reasoned
arguments and analyses, aren't the posts
pulling in the big numbers, it's the
emotional responses. The rants, the raging,
in that moment of anger why would I
check to see if that story is real the
headline is right there and from a
trusted source and is so rage-inducing
that I have to share it, right away.
It prompts an immediate reaction. There's
no time for fact-checking, because the
immediate response, is to hit retweet to
tell everyone we know about this so that
they can be as enraged as we are. Because
seriously, Scott what are you thinking?
Disney is gonna take away all the scary
murdery elements that has made FNAF into
what it is to this day. you're diluting
the brand by selling it to Disney, man.
Come on
And as you might imagine this starts to
get real dangerous, real fast, we're in an
age of ripple effect entertainment where
one small post, or one small story can
escalate and grow, and grow, into a much
bigger much, more massive, much more
dangerous thing. A world where one person
posts a fake story on reddit, or
manufacturers a fake news image on
Twitter, it picks up momentum, gets some
upvotes, some retweets, suddenly smaller
blogs are picking, it up larger accounts
start to talk about it,
hashtags starts to trend, until it's all
the way up to the mainstream media and
big-time news outlets. and at that point,
no one has actually gone back to check
the original source. In fact it's almost
impossible to find that original source.
Bandwagoning has made it into a reality.
If you want a concrete example then look
no further than 2007 and the iPhone 4.
the blog engadget reported on
authority that the iphone 4's
release date was getting pushed back from
June to October, and potentially
later. In less than 15 minutes after that
article was published, I kid you not when
I say this,
Apple's value as a company, dropped by
four billion dollars. Four. Billion
Dollars in 15 minutes. And as I'm sure
you can guess, the engadget article was a
complete hoax.
Luckily Apple was able to clarify the
situation and recover most of the lost
money by the end of the day, but it just
goes to show how dangerous this stuff
can be. Especially when it's influencing
the candidates that we vote for. The way
that we choose to spend our money, and
the way that we feel about other people,
and other cultures. So click bait and the
fake news that it generates can be a real
problem. But what can we do? Well,
newspapers have been dealing with this
model for a long time, but way back when
yellow journalism was a problem, one of
the first big answers to fake news, was
designing a system that wasn't based on
selling papers on street corners anymore.
It was based on, of all things,
subscriptions. How is that better?
Well, take for instance the New York
Times, one of the first
subscription-based newspapers. When they
had a subscribership they could count on,
the newspaper no longer had to worry
about whether their headlines where
clickbaity enough to sell to the same customer
every day, they had a consistent source
of income that they could rely upon. That
in turn, left the journalists relax a
little bit enabled them to print more
normal-looking stories, and maybe even
spend some time fact checking. For the
subscribers, meanwhile, they were
supporting a product that they believed
in, and that they trusted to deliver
regular content. Lots of newspapers
still have a subscribership model, and
it's exactly because of this. If you're
financially supporting the paper, it
shouldn't have to rely on sleazy tactics
to stay afloat. But okay, that's all fine
and dandy for traditional media, but a
lot of traditional media is dying, and
here on YouTube, we hear about one thing,
more YouTube! So what's the cure for
clickbait here?
well, actually it's the same thing.
YouTube has subscribers. Sometimes people
I work with ask me why subscriber
numbers matter so much to creators, and
really it's for the same reason as it
mattered to the newspapers. YouTubers
count on subscribers to keep coming back,
and supporting the channel. Sure those
viewers aren't paying a fee for that
subscription, but it's a generally
reliable source of income.
A system based on trust. I trust that those
four million people subscribed to the
channel like the videos that I make, and
then a fairly sizable number of those
people will be checking back on every
upload that we do, so, I can make more of
them, and in turn, you trust that my
videos are going to be good, and so you
keep coming back. It's a great system. So when
YouTube starts changing the visibility
of our videos to subscribers, and
subscribe views drop, or they start
implementing new systems, like ring the
bell to get notified of everything that
the channel does, rather than some of the
things that the channel does. Well, it
presents a big problem, because it's YouTube
breaking down that system of trust.
Artificially cutting off that line of
communication, and throwing YouTube
creators, and their fans, into this weird
dark area where we can no longer
communicate with each other. So as a
result, what do you see when that happens?
You see more channels turning to
clickbait. Turning to sensationalized
titles, turning to the Youtube version of
yellow journalism, to try and get their
videos seen for just, one more day. If you
can't count on the stability of the
platform, you start resorting to content
that's the lowest common denominator. But
funny enough, it's also possible that the
final solution is YouTube Red. Yeah, that
thing. For those of you that don't know,
or have successfully triggered it out of
your mind, YouTube Red is YouTube's
subscription service. making the site ad-free,
in an effort to move away from
advertising revenue. There's other stuff
too, like access to some pretty great
shows, like RhettandLink's buddy system,
oh and I suppose there's MatPat's Game Lab, too.
That was, alright. I enjoyed it.
but all shameless self-promotion aside,
when YouTube launched it we as YouTube
viewers weren't exactly welcoming it with
open arms. Reports were piling in both on
and off the site, that red would kill the
YouTube community by taking money away
from the creators. And that revenue
across the board would drop for everyone.
But now ask yourselves this: What actual
data did you see in any of those
articles? Was it rational arguments about
what this meant for the site, or was it
clickbaity titles that were designed to
make you feel angry, and upset, that
YouTube was changing, that you are better
dead than red. And so you wanted to go
out, and share that video, because now we
can look back at the data, and I can
honestly say across all the channels
that I help consult, it has only
increased the amount of money that they
earn above and beyond what they would be
earning
in ads anyway, granted, the system was
and still, isn't perfect.
YouTube honestly must have hated me during
the lead up to Game Lab over on the game
theorists channel, because I complained
about a ton of stuff related to Red, but
a lot of our fears came from, once again,
people looking to make a buck. Peddling
in fear to make a profit, and causing the
public to rebel against a decision that
quite honestly, helps creators make
better, higher-quality projects, and if
nothing else earns more revenue per view
than they would otherwise. All while
helping to stifle this fake news problem.
So what do we do?
Who's gonna fix all this? The answer is,
no one but us. At the end of the day,
videos only go where we, as the audience
will follow. Your viewing choices matter.
And they matter a lot.
So, in 2017, there's no election, but vote
with your view. Knowing when and how
you're being manipulated is half the
battle. So support creators who do good
work, not just the ones that make you
feel angry or who talk about issues
without any real information. We do have
the power here. And it's our obligation
to do the research ourselves, because as
you've seen, no one else, is gonna do it
for us. But hey, that's just a theory one
half of this theory, because if you want
to see more, click this annotation, or the
top line of the description to check out
a different perspective on this issue
over on my channel, game theory. In that
video, which is timed to release exactly
at the same time this one comes out I,
look at the complaint a bunch of
youtubers had been having about
declining views, and we analyze the real
reasons behind it is it entirely
YouTube's fault, or something else?
The answer, will shock you! How's that for
a clickbaity lead-in? So anyway, click on
the giant flashing add to go over there
and check it out. And hey, make sure that you,
ring my bell, right there, that- that Bell
thing. Like I said earlier this episode,
the subscription mechanism working
properly, is one of the best ways to
combat all of this. So, ring the bell and
keep your fingers crossed, that, my videos
continue to show up for ya. We'll be back
to normal episodes next time, but until
then remember, that's just a theory, a
film theory!
Aaaand cut! If you want an amazing first
look at all this, check out the book
'Trust me, I'm lying' written by Ryan
Holliday. Who worked inside these systems
and learned how to exploit them, both for
his own benefit, and for his clients'. But why
listen to me when the back of the book
says everything you need to know. quote,
'Why am I giving away these secrets?
because I'm tired of a world where blogs
take indirect bribes, marketers help
write the news, reckless journalists
spread lies and no one is accountable
for any of it. I'm going to explain
exactly how the media really works.' End
quote. Now if that doesn't peak your
interest, I don't know what will.
Or maybe I do?