I want to talk about something I’ve talked about before – if you know me personally you’ve heard about it a lot – which is assholes going after online content creators as a way of getting cheap clicks. But this time is a little different.
If you don’t live under a rock, you’ve probably heard of a YouTuber called PewDiePie, and you may have heard a story that popped up a few weeks ago about a rather nasty scandal involving him. You may not have heard that said story was a giant steaming pile of clickbait bullshit, but now you have so there you go. In a nutshell, there was a minor incident with a joke gone wrong which blew over the way things like that usually do, but then some ‘journalists’ dug it up and puffed it up after the fact, a supposedly reputable news source ran with the story and then a whole bunch of other mainstream media outlets picked it up and ran with it too because CLICKBAIT. Oh holy shit, so much clickbait. It was everywhere. It still is. A whole bunch of people have already talked about it in great detail, though, so if you want a more blow-by-blow account – with visuals! – go watch one of their videos.
And you’re saying okay, that’s interesting, but what does something happening to a YouTuber have to do with us?
Well, for starters, PewDiePie wasn’t the only one it’s happened to recently – he was just the biggest. Some news outlets also ran with a story blaming ‘novels by YouTube stars‘ recently – specifically one YouTube vlogger called Zoella – for a decline in teens’ reading skills because the teens are reading her stuff instead of reading ‘more challenging novels’. I’m still not sure how people choosing to read her books is her ‘fault’, and we will not go into my opinion of the literary snobbery the researcher behind the study and the journalists behind some of the news stories were spewing. Or my opinion about them all thinking it’s such a good thing elementary school students are reading the entire Harry Potter series, especially since not that long ago people like them were slamming the HP series because it was popular and not up to their lofty literary standards…but I digress. There have been other examples in the past, like the ones we get when a cheap-shot article writer farts out snootily scathing articles about fanfiction, but I’m not going to go dig them all up. You’ve seen them. And unfortunately, we’re not going to stop seeing them – we’re going to start seeing even more. Why, you ask? Well, let me answer that with something The Amazing Atheist had to say about the mainstream media’s motives in his take on the PewDiePie situation: “They don’t want you watching independently created content, they want you watching and reading their shit.”
For those of you who are thinking I’ve joined the tinfoil hat brigade…well, I haven’t. He had a point. The assholes who kicked off the PewDiePie scandal with open intent to destroy him (they admitted as much) were working for the Wall Street Journal. Which so far as I know has shown no sign they care even the least little bit that their ‘journalists’ knowingly slandered a successful indy content creator, gloated over the fallout afterward on social media, and then approached the content creator after the fact – and after blatantly lying about having tried to contact him before their story came out – to try to milk the situation for even more clicks. That’s not just some two-bit blogger or paid-per-article content writer going after indy creators for shits and giggles and easy clicks, that’s a major news outlet, a cornerstone of the mainstream media. And that is fucking scary to me.
Because if they’ll do that to someone on YouTube, what else will they do, and to who? All of us who create content online are also now taking eyes and clicks away from the mainstream media – we are apparently, in their eyes and possibly in reality, competing with them. So what else will they puff up or lie about? Who might end up being fair game the next time they go digging for story material? Anyone, that’s who. Anyone is fair game now, not just people who are actually doing bad things, not just people whose positions in society might merit extra scrutiny. Anyone who looks like they might be good for a few clicks, regardless of whether the story being told is true or not, could end up being used this way by the mainstream media to improve profits on a slow news day. Bad for the person – quite possibly for a long, long time, since the Internet never forgets – but great for a few days worth of clicks!
And of course that’s putting aside the fact that these are the people we’re supposed to be trusting to truthfully and impartially report actual news about things we have no other way of finding out about on our own. People who have proved that they’re petty and mercenary, that Ethics in Journalism is just the name of a class they had to take, and that their employers could not care less as long as the money keeps rolling in. But we’re putting that aside, because if we don’t this rant is going to be pages long and I’ll end up sounding like the leader of the Tinfoil Hat Parade and we’ll all be pissed off. More pissed off, anyway.
If you’re expecting me to trot out some kind of potential solution…well, I’m not sure there is one. This situation with the media is only going to get worse, because clicks = $$$ and they don’t give a shit what people think about how they get those clicks unless it starts costing them money (hint: it’s not going to). What we can do, though, is remember that we need to stick together and stick up for each other when shit like this goes down. The other YouTubers did that for PewDiePie, even the ones who don’t like his content, and the rest of us need to start thinking that way too. We need to start thinking and acting like a community – something the writing world doesn’t have a very good track record with – and we need to do it yesterday, because you know what? We can’t afford to be petty and divisive and live in a bubble anymore. If we don’t support each other in spite of our differences, we all lose – the creators, the consumers, and ultimately the world that will end up being deprived of diverse voices, differing opinions, and the very necessary and important free flow of creative expression.
And as your reward for reading all of that, here is a picture of Tasha Bear, who could care less about any of this and was displeased that I interrupted her nap.
