![]() To help speed things up, YouTube has created tools such as its Trusted Flagger program-a way government agencies and NGOs, among others, can assist with moderation. Yet the review process is cumbersome, slow, and inconsistent, current and former moderators have told The Washington Post. Between January and March 2021, YouTube says it removed more than nine million videos for violating its community guidelines. Its community guidelines bar “violent or gory content intended to shock or disgust viewers,” and the company says it has hired 10,000 people and uses machine learning to moderate the 500 hours of video uploaded to the platform every minute. Since the first YouTube video was uploaded in 2005, the platform has grown exponentially-and with it, criticism that it doesn’t do enough to prevent content deemed damaging to the public good, such as hoax conspiracies, hate speech, animal cruelty, and more. But to begin profiting from the Google-owned platform’s ad-sharing programs, channel owners need a thousand subscribers and 4,000 hours of viewership during the previous 12 months. ![]() Anyone can create a YouTube channel and post videos to it. By posting something that gets millions of clicks on social media, someone potentially can make thousands of dollars, according to Jason Urgo, the CEO of Social Blade, a company that tracks social media platform statistics. Why do people force captive animals into dangerous or harmful situations? To get as many clicks as possible and likely make money. The videos often have titles with phrasing such as “primitive man saves snake” which encourages “racial intolerance and misunderstanding” he says. The IUCN sets the conservation status of wild animals. They also divert attention from genuine animal welfare and conservation issues, says Daniel Natusch, a conservation biologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and a member of several reptile specialist groups with the International Union for Conservation of Nature. It’s natural for animals to predate in the wild, without human intervention, yet the videos mislead viewers about animals’ natural behaviors, demonizing predator species such as snakes and birds of prey. Beyond that, fake animal rescues spread misconceptions about species and inspire copycats, says Chaber, who has studied how YouTube normalizes the exotic pet trade and interactions between humans and wild animals. Making the videos causes stress, injury, and likely even death for the animals involved, says Anne-Lise Chaber, a wildlife veterinarian and One Health specialist at the University of Adelaide, in Australia. In each case, the kills are thwarted by human saviors who conveniently come upon them or hear the animals’ cries in time to prevent carnage. They’re all variations on a theme: An eagle attacks a snake, a crocodile attacks a duck, snakes attack pet cats, dogs, lizards. Several years ago, animal welfare groups first started noticing that videos of fake animal rescues were proliferating on YouTube. To Auliya, the only things that appeared real were the mistreatment of the animals being forced into these situations and the stress it must have caused them. Pythons also are nocturnal hunters, yet this video and many like it were shot during the day. But pythons first bite prey animals to anchor their constriction-something that didn’t happen in the gibbon video, Auliya says. The video seemed to suggest that the rescuer had arrived just in time to save the gibbon. “It’s so obvious this is fake, but people believe it,” says Auliya, a herpetologist at the Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig. ![]() ![]() The traumatized gibbon cowers, covering its head. Hurriedly, he uncoils the python, freeing the gibbon, and carries the snake offscreen. A man in a blue soccer jersey and jeans appears. The panicked primate was fighting for its life as the snake, coiled around its torso, began squeezing. On Auliya’s screen, a Burmese python, a constrictor that normally kills birds and small mammals, was locked onto a gibbon. “This is something really nasty,” he said. But last month, staring at a YouTube video in his home office in Bonn, Germany, the reptile expert threw his glasses down in disgust. Mark Auliya has no problem with snakes attacking other animals.
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