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.
A channel absolutely should be held accountable for the sponsors they accept. Advertisements from YouTube are mostly outside channel owners control, but sponsors are not.
I don’t support channels with unethical sponsors. It can be tough sometimes.
Veritasium is YouTube propaganda. It’s well documented - Derek takes sponsor money and gets people killed in the process. I blocked Derek on all platforms the day Tom put this documentary video out.
Funnily enough the person that made this video had a little controversy on the vape-o-nomics video when he was talking about how subscription services were bad but then immediately pivoted towards an ad read for a subscription service.
Eventually it was removed (without a comment talking about, it happened silently) but still this stuff reaches everyone eventually.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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)!
From a diagnosis and classification, Autism = Asperger’s.
From a lived experience, Autism != Asperger’s.
The latter has been validated by every expert I have talked over the years from doctors to therapists to education.
that advert is terrifying, what the hell
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
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.
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)
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
The “BetterHelp” YouTube Virus is BACK
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.
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.
To some degree, certainly! If at some point it comes out that a certain sponsor is just total shit, a content creator can be made aware of that. Although, with all these things, it is not always as easy to just drop a sponsor i suppose, there is always contracts involved and all of that. So not expecting a creator to be able to drop a sponsor all of a sudden.
Veratasium had some similar issue a few years ago too, didn’t he?
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.
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.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.
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’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.
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.
It’s likely they signed a contract with them before the (second) controversy, I feel like a better way to do this is to see if they continue with the shitty sponsors
But they should be held accountable for this kind of stuff
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 do that kind of thing, yes. Although I usually find it so distasteful, that I lose interest in watching other videos anyways.
But yeah, especially when it’s a channel making educational content, there’s a chance that some viewers take the sponsored section as general educational content (no matter, whether that’s because they’re gullible, young or did not pay attention when the sponsor segway happened).
There’s also various tech channels which recommend products that are objectively worse than the alternatives, or even exert malware-like behaviour. Those also immediately lose any and all respect from me.
Obviously, if it was a genuinely good product, it wouldn’t need the sponsorship deal for people to make videos about it. So, I do understand the struggle.
But everyone wanting to make a living off of media has that struggle. If I artificially inflate the view numbers of one media creator, the others receive less sponsorship money.pretty sure his video about Charmin flushable wipes being the only actually flushable wipes on the planet was bullshit
