Hi! I'm Dave from Boyinaband!
Recently, I was looking around the Internet
when I found a video telling me "You are not depressed!" "Stop it!"
with an angry looking guy in the thumbnail
who I recognised
This is Prince Ea
He's a Youtuber and rapper
who has more recently started making content which is motivating and inspiring
according to himself
You've probably seen some of the more successful stuff on Facebook
His spoken word videos have gone freakin' crazy viral
Now at first glance, it looks like he's spreading a good message
but underneath the surface there are some really fundamental things he's doing
which struck me as seriously dodgy
and watching the video behind the angry thumbnail pushed me over the edge
so today I'm calling out Prince EA on several things I think he's doing wrong
First, that video
okay so it´s obvious clickbait and that's understandable
we've all gotta do what we gotta do
tocompetewithbuzzfeed
youknowwhatI'msayin
But the problem I have is within the content
Did he just say that?
I'm so mad I'm seriously going to go off on this guy in the comments
How did he know?
Okay I'm gonna have to stop you there
No. Depression does not always go
See it looks like you're mixing up this wikipedia page with this one
"depressed" can be a mood like sadness or frustration
but "depressed" can also refer to major depressive
pffffrickinghair
major depressive disorder
a mental disorder people are genetically predisposed to
I'll let this professor from Stanford University explain it
It's a biochemical disorder with a genetic component
in early experience influences
where somebody can't appreciate sunsets
and that's what this disease is about
Seriously well worth watching the full thing
small Hagrid has some great insight
so let's see what else Prince has to say
If you have to tell someone something is life changing
then it probably isn't that life changing
Okay I get what you're trying to say
if you treat your emotions and thoughts as if you were a passive observer
you're more likely to be able to live with them
this is at the core of a type of scientifically backed therapy
which my therapist did called ACT
I actually e-mailed one of the people who created the therapy
Steven Hayes sent me a bunch of studies with evidence of it being effective
but there are a lot of people who are stuck with brains that do not let their sadness go
and this is why this part of his video is so problematic
For those people who have the mental disorder
it's like saying to someone in the middle of a heart attack
'You don't have heart attacks
you may be experiencing a heart attack
but you do not have heart attacks
heart attacks come...
they go....'
And judging from the comments it's not just me who felt strongly about this
In fact one of his fans uploaded a response video which really explained this well
First of all thank you
for
being an increadible force for change
it's fantastic but uhm
dude if this is depression
and you had been in my house yesterday
I would have thrown the fucking thing at you
it's not a choice that people make
it's a shift in perception that's caused by
or has it's basis in biochemistry
What you're saying now I think almost even errs on the side of being a little bit dangerous for folks [hard to hear, someone please check]
But I thought I'd give him the benefit of the doubt
maybe he just messed up once with this topic
until I found another video where he mentions the same concept
with some more mistakes
See this world we live in it creates depression
For the mood: yes.
For the mental illness: no.
Sunsets
This is where the damaging part comes in
See everybody suffers from depression
There's always this little voice between the lines there of "Come on, pull yourself together"
"we all deal with this sort of thing"
This video is going to encourage that voice in depressed people
which makes them feel inadequate
everyone else has a come and go but not me
That's the kind of thing that could contribute to the statisticky reference at the start of this video
Did you know that in ten years
depression will be the leading cause of death
Hang on, really?
Even over heart disease or cancer?
That seems really freaking high
let me check your sources
oh wait, there isn't one
wait is it here?
no what about under here
behind this?
HERE?
WHETHEHELLISIT?
and this is the next problem
The guy references studies all over the place
I read a study yesterday
Studies show the
There was a study done a hospital study
At a rate of 40 football fields every minute
But I can't find his sources any fricking where
not in the description
not on his Facebook posts
not hidden in the background of his videos
WAIT WHAT'S THAT
oh it's just bigfoot false alarm
*AHAAAH*
So I have no idea whether what he's saying is just made up
like in his video 'Can We Auto-Correct Humanity?'
did you know the average person spends 4 years of his life looking down at his cellphone
wow really?
well i'd love to research this to contribute to the conversation but I can't because
you don't CITE THE
FRIKIN' SOURCE
And this made me wonder just how much scientific misinformation
is this guy just casually throwing out there
so I started to check
Studies show the attention span of the average adult today
is one second lower
than that of a goldfish
Now this struck me as absolute crap and it turns out
that that's because it's absolute crap
The closest I could find to a source that he might be referencing
was a marketing brochure saying:
The average time a user spends to digest information has decreased significantly over the past twelve years
from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 in 2012
less than the average attention span of a goldfish
and after hours of searching I couldn't find the actual study at all
but even if we put aside for the moment the fact that he's citing a study that doesn't seem to exist
it still means absolutely bugger-all
because the study measured how long internet users spend on each page before moving on to the next one
it might show that websites load faster now
or that there's more crap on the internet that we have to wade through
before finding the good stuff
But it does not show that people are incapable of paying attention to important messages
which the next part of the video suggests
so if you wanted a few people or
aquatic animals that have yet to
click off or close this video
congratulations
CONGRATULATIONS
And not only did he mess up the part about human attention spans
but the goldfish part is also wrong
here are two studies proving they can remember things for months
and if that's not your thing
even fricking mythbusters did an episode proving it wrong
Thirty seconds I think is pretty good to make it through four holes
it's clear that they've learned and
and it's clear that they do, in fact, have a memory longer than three seconds
MYTH BUSTED
I just don't know how many more layers of wrongness it's possible to pile onto one sentence
except maybe this one.
Now that one was just a random fact trying to strengthen his point
but some of the things he claims have worse consequences
A line that made me fricking shake with frustration was:
Videos are 6 seconds at high speed
And you wonder why ADD is on the rise
Okay so as you might say:
Now here I know you didn't do any research
not just because you called it ADD when it's been known
in the psychological community as ADHD since 1987
but also
ADHD is one of the most fricking genetic mental disorders
I contacted one of the worlds leading ADHD experts
Dr. Russell Barkley
who told me that and then explained:
70 to 80% is the result of differences in genetics
across the entire population it exceeds the genetic variation in any psychological trait
if you have an identical twin with ADHD
the risk to you is 75 to 90, 94 percent roughly
So does watching short video cause ADHD?
But we found no real evidence of purely social factors that can explain this disorder
it really behaves very much like a biological trait
ADHD is fricking horrible
it's essentially being trapped in your own brain unable to control yourself like normal people can
this guy is spreading a lie that people could avoid it if they just stopped using their phones
rather than the truth that it is one of the most treatable genetic disorders with medication
and this from a guy who (according to himself) is
"making smart cool"
Imma make smart cool again
That is definitely not smart and it is
definitely not cool
So why would he do this?
Well if we take a look later in his video
it brings me to the final issue with Prince EA
Oh Princey! Princey wincey!
(Hey! Hey! Hey!)
Prince EA makes things seem a lot worse than they actually are
so people get emotional enough to share it
Mr Zuckerberg
not to be rude but
you should reclassify Facebook to what it is
an anti
social
network
yeah because some people are not using Facebook in a healthy way
the entire site
which has allowed billions of people to keep in touch across countries
is anti-social
he gives no sense of nuance to the argument and he often just totally lies
technoloGY has made us more
selfish and seperate than ever
here are several sources which found charitable giving has been growing for decades
but I'd love to see what you base your point on
but ohwaityouDIDN'TCITETHE SOURCEAANY
The news is 140 characters
I could have sworn that technology let us freely share our footage and re-
the news is 140 characters
issues like police brutality which ne-
THE NEWS IS 140 CHARACTERS
twitter didn't sto-
THE NEWS IS 140
okay okay what else is wrong
no longer do I wanna
spoil a precious moment by
recording it with a phone
wanna spoil a precious moment
precious moment by
precious mo
momnet by
recording it with a phone
I'm just gonna keep them
I've noticed this is a surprisingly popular opinion
but I just don't get what's wrong with it
what if you wanna share it with someone who couldn't be there
or if you have a bad memory
or if, heaven forbid, you enjoy looking at photo's
I don't wanna take a picture of all my
meals anymore I'm just gonna eat them
I don't see the appeal of taking pictures of food either but some people seem to enjoy it
what's wrong with that?
just don't follow them on Instagram
I don't want the
new app the
new software
or the new update
well in that case your cyber security is going to be severely comprimised
and if I wanna post an old photo
hang on you just said you don't w-
The news is a hundred and forty characters
oh my mistake
and it ends on this big point
I imagine a world where we smile when we have low batteries
cause that'll mean we'll be one bar closer
to humanity
the implication here is that technology prevents humanity
how many films or songs have made you emotional?
or how many online conversations made people happy
your own videos judging from the response made people emotional which is very human
and he went even further in another video
entitled "Why I Think This World Should End"
Technology has given us everything we could ever want
And at the same time, stolen everything we really need
really nee-need really nee- NEED
Frinkin' everything around us is technology
easily accessible food
your frickin' polo shirt
What's the cut-off point for you? 1846?
Was the penny farthing a step too far?
wat?!
He continues to monger fear
It's easier to find a Big Mac than an apple.
No it isn't, there are more supermarkets than McDonald's.
Where are you looking for fruit?
Also, you can get apples at McDonalds, just ask.
When you find the apple, it's been genetically processed and modified
We've been genetically modifying things for centuries
Bananas used to look like this
Do you want that? Do you wanna eat that Prince Ea?
There's more violence on the screen than ever before
And yet it is the least violent period in human history
Today, we are probably living in the most peaceful time in our species existence
Death rate goes down from 65,000 in the 1950s
to less than 2,000 deaths in this decade
There's so much of this crap
He makes it seem like the world is getting worse and worse
when in a lot of ways we're improving
but that's not a sharable poetry video is it?
Now this point i have made me stop thinking this could be just unintentional
and made me question if he respects his audience at all
So on Facebook, different post types get different promotion by Facebook's algorithm
so Facebook can make the most money
Things which keep people on the site for longer are promoted
Like videos and posts
and links which take people off the site don't
Which is why upload most of my videos to facebook directly
rather than just linking to the youtube video
and Prince EA does this himself by uploading video to facebook and youtube separately
Now I noticed something weird on Prince E's facebook
Very often he linked to articles externally instead of making posts directly on facebook
Now I wondered why he wouldn't just post directly to facebook
or stick to the motivational quote pictures which he slaps his name on to get a bit more exposure
then I realized that most of the articles were from the same few websites
most were plastered with ads and some were focused with selling something
when you see what this clickbait crap is it gets worse
I found this article written for Prince EA whatever that means
on this site titled 6 signs you are in the presence of a deceased family member
They get money by lying to desperate grieved people and spamming their pages with ads
I might understand if this was a few articles which he had made a mistake about but
this is systematic, it's fricking daily!
So I wondered hang on, is he getting paid for this?
Isn't he supposed to disclose when he's getting paid to endorse something
So I looked it up, In America, which is where he's from
The FTC regulates how legal this stuff is
I found the FTC guidelines saying
But maybe he actually is just sharing articles regularly
which decreases his facebook ranking and potential audience growth
Until I saw that some of them were written by him
and the FTC guidelines also had a q&a section
which had this part
Either he's writing a lot of unpaid clickbait articles
or he's making money by misleading his audience everyday
and as he's said repeatedly he's really smart
*rapping* imma make smart cool again
or perhaps I missed something which is entirely possible
but it seems seriously fishy to me
One of the most frustrating things about all of this is that
fundamentally I like that he's trying to do good in he world
he clearly makes a lot of people happy and inspires even if he does say so himself
and has raised some great awareness with a few of his videos
but these vague generalizations with no scientific backing just make it impossible to trust what he's saying
and what's worse is there are plenty of other issues that he could address
which are a lot less vague and still incredibly important
since Prince EA has called out individuals in the past to give constructive criticism
I thought this might be the most appropriate way to address him
*music playing* *rapping* I read a study the other day
It said be careful when you're listening to prince EA
Not gonna cite it in case you criticize it but let me try to summarize it anyway
It said if some guy makes wild unsourced claims
and never provide citations
for what he states
and tries to drum up fear over what's not a big deal
then be skeptical as hell of what he's saying
calling everyone's depression the same
are you insane?
Guess not, or at least one psychiatrist would've explained
it can't always just be thought out,
Jesus,
it's chemical imbalance please first do some research
And saying ADD is caused by media consumption
You kinda hard to trust with such incorrect pressumptions
A mountain of evidence is that it is gentic
And man, it's AD /H/ D, don't you listen to Kendrick?
You won't record precious moments on a phone?
I suppose you hated the moment you posted this photo with Oprah
you hippy hypocrite
But a back-track lickety-split
Deleted all of it quick
We're causing society's downfall!
Technology's out to get us,
Put down your phones, they're devious
Oh, and before you do,
Follow me on social media.
You hate media overstimulation,
Wait, look...
How many spam articles are you posting on Facebook?
But I've got to give congratulations...
For picking a videographer
good enough to distract
from the inaccurate crap you're saying.
Fear-mongering over the state of the world to seem clever
When several of the things you said are better than ever
We are way less selfish
And we're safer than historically
And what made that possible?
Oh yeah, technology.
Human curiosity, man that is humanity
What isn't is spreading misinformation that's damaging!
Now I'm not perfect, I bet I have some citations missed.
But I try to be consistent,
and if it isn't, then I'll fix it.
I like your aim to bring attention to important issues,
And if you fixed things, you'd be great.
Hell, that's why I thought to diss you
But if you won't listen to me,
Maybe you'll listen to one of your fans who
left this comment trying to help you understand
saying "Even though I really like your thoughts and attitude,
gonna unfollow 'cause of clickbait ads and lack of scientific proof."
Peace.