The Most Popular YouTube Videos About The Coronavirus Are Being Made In India -- And They're Full Of Hoaxes (buzzfeednews.com) 51
India is in the middle of a YouTube-powered coronavirus frenzy that could kill people. From a report: The most popular YouTube video in the world about the coronavirus was created by a channel called Wonderful Secrets of the World, which typically publishes Hindi-language videos about sports and cars, as well as roundups like "Top 5 Secret Places Hidden in Famous Locations" or "30 Amazing Facts About Human Body." The channel, the logo of which looks uncannily like that of Volkswagen, hides its subscriber count, but 16 of its videos have been viewed over a million times -- the most popular being the coronavirus explainer, which has been seen 13.6 million times as of Wednesday. Wonderful Secrets of the World isn't an outlier. It is the tip of a huge Indian YouTube iceberg of content about the outbreak. The disease has 75,280 confirmed cases, and 2,014 deaths, mostly in mainland China. Shared at high rates, these videos often combine basic facts about the novel coronavirus from Wuhan, China, with Indian nationalist propaganda and hearsay -- with serious real-life consequences.
There are reports of a man in southeast India who had a urinary tract infection and killed himself on Feb. 10, mistakenly thinking he had the coronavirus. His son told local media he was watching a lot of videos about the virus online. "We told him that he did not have coronavirus, but he refused to let us near him. He told all the villagers to stay away. He would tell them that their kids would also end up contracting it if they came close to him," his son told reporters. Karen Rebelo, deputy editor for Boom, an Indian fact-checking organization that reported on the story, told BuzzFeed News it's extremely difficult to fact-check YouTube videos because often it's not a straightforward question of whether the content is true or false. "Most Indians coming online for the first time start by streaming YouTube videos because it's free," Rebelo said. She said that most fact-checking efforts in India are only being done in English and Hindi, so things are even more complicated for videos being created in regional languages. It's also hard to fact-check videos that mix truth and hoax freely together.
There are reports of a man in southeast India who had a urinary tract infection and killed himself on Feb. 10, mistakenly thinking he had the coronavirus. His son told local media he was watching a lot of videos about the virus online. "We told him that he did not have coronavirus, but he refused to let us near him. He told all the villagers to stay away. He would tell them that their kids would also end up contracting it if they came close to him," his son told reporters. Karen Rebelo, deputy editor for Boom, an Indian fact-checking organization that reported on the story, told BuzzFeed News it's extremely difficult to fact-check YouTube videos because often it's not a straightforward question of whether the content is true or false. "Most Indians coming online for the first time start by streaming YouTube videos because it's free," Rebelo said. She said that most fact-checking efforts in India are only being done in English and Hindi, so things are even more complicated for videos being created in regional languages. It's also hard to fact-check videos that mix truth and hoax freely together.
Inheritance scams no longer working (Score:3, Funny)
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Probably also means that MS is not gonna bother me about my malware collection anymore.
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Hell, even if they are speaking English, I doubt I could understand the heavy accents that well on videos in India on YouTube for Indians.
Why is this a YT story?
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A role model (Score:5, Insightful)
If we had more like him, we'd finally have less like him.
Sorry, I couldn't resist. But what are you gonna do? Conspiracy nuts are going to believe in conspiracies, and no amount of reason has ever managed to get through to them.
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Well, yeah. Conspiracy nuts. But this sounds like something different, like when American Indians succumbed to things like chicken pox during the Columbian Exchange. You take a huge population of people with no media savvy at all and expose them to enough Internet hoaxes wrapped up in God and the Flag (or in this case gods), and you're going to have stories like this.
I have more sympathy for some elderly Indian villager who falls for an obvious scientific hoax than I do for a young, college-educated Ame
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We're still talking about something that has a 1 in 100 lethality. In countries with sub-par medical conditions (so far we don't have a reliable statistics for countries with good sanitary and medical conditions yet). That's not exactly something you could put on par with a disease that has a mortality of close to 90% untreated and still 10-20% with decent medical treatment. Or even compare with it.
It's not the mortality rates that makes this a problem. It's the infection rates and that it can easily overwh
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Yes, I agree. Some of the excess deaths may be to things unrelated to the virus except that they need medical attention that is not available.
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It's certainly related to the virus, but most likely complications that modern medicine if applied correctly and in a timely manner could have handled. You will notice that the last pandemic that had a serious impact in the western world, the Spanish flu, hit right at a time when we were very vulnerable to diseases and didn't have a lot of medical facilities prepared and ready for such an event, i.e. right after the world has been through one of the most devastating wars of recorded history. This time aroun
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I never said it was *unrelated* to the virus's direct biological; that would be silly. I'm saying there are indirect effects as well that are mediated through stress on the health care delivery system. These effects can kill people who have not been exposed to the virus.
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like when American Indians succumbed to things like chicken pox during the Columbian Exchange
We're still talking about something that has a 1 in 100 lethality. In countries with sub-par medical conditions (so far we don't have a reliable statistics for countries with good sanitary and medical conditions yet). That's not exactly something you could put on par with a disease that has a mortality of close to 90% untreated and still 10-20% with decent medical treatment. Or even compare with it.
Chicken pox does not kill close to 90% of untreated infected persons.
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yeah, that's going to be a problem. (Score:3)
She said that most fact-checking efforts in India are only being done in English and Hindi, so things are even more complicated for videos being created in regional languages. It's also hard to fact-check videos that mix truth and hoax freely together.
India has a crazy amount of languages and dialects (1500+ with 10K+ speakers). Fact checking English and Hindi is good but Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati and Urdu all have 50M+ speakers [wikipedia.org] each but aren't being checked.
They should be investing in fact checking every language with 1M+ speakers if they want their efforts to be effective in any real way.
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Hell, YouTube doesn't bother fact checking things in plain English. As long as you generate clicks and ad revenue, you are good to go.
In fact they punish channels that do a once-a-month well researched video by driving traffic away from them in favor of vloggers that do a twice-a-day 2 minute blab with 3 ads. better when the videos target children. Youtube makes far more money on a per-video basis.
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True, but they usually only hit each other with sticks, so who cares?
YouTube, my go to for critical medical information (Score:4, Insightful)
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Just like real gold, then.
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If you dig through all the crap on youtube, the gold nugget turns out to be just undigested sweetcorn.
Re:YouTube, my go to for critical medical informat (Score:4, Interesting)
They can't read, and these smart phones are showing videos and audios. First time they are getting information from far off places, and they dont know what to trust or even judge how to trust the videos.
All political parties are churning out questionable propaganda videos too. India is getting very polarized.
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It does point out a legitimate problem (Score:2)
Slashdot (Score:3)
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If you look at the number of comments, the coronavirus stories are virtually the only ones getting any attention. It's what people are interested in. It's affecting their businesses, their 401ks, and their vacation plans. It's making them question their local health providers' preparation, the food distribution network, whether facemasks do a damn thing... And they are contemplating possible death of friends or family. So if you don't like all the stories, go for a walk in the park.
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You don't even need to go outside, you can do that on YouTube [youtube.com].
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9/12/2001, US: "Guys, I'm sick of hearing about this world trade center stuff, FFS can't we talk about games or something?!"
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It only affects the 401Ks of people stupid enough to figure out how to sell all their investments when they the news-reader on the teevee instructs them to start freaking out.
People who know that their 401K isn't a get-poor-quick scheme, but a retirement plan, will not buy or sell based on what the tee-vee says, but based on if they're currently retiring or not. And so they won't lose any money at all.
Anybody in your family that is likely enough to die from this that you would benefit from anticipating it i
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We paid /.? Since when?
E-Mail will soon start (Score:3)
Your computer has contracted the Coronavirus.
Re:E-Mail will soon start (Score:4, Funny)
All Windows 10 computers already have the Cortanavirus.
Dark side of always-on connectivity (Score:3)
This sounds mean, but I believe it's true -- the combination of social media plus devices easy enough for non-technical people to use is a toxic brew. YouTube, Facebook and others are perfect platforms to rile up the villagers and get them to get out the torches and pitchforks, as we've seen in the last 7 or 8 years.
Think about it, you have a platform that looks like a legitimate news source, combined with a user interface that anyone can use of they can mash their fingers on a screen, running on a device they have with them 24/7 that fills up every single second of idle time. People don't differentiate social media from actual journalism anymore, and that's not helped by the "fake news" crowd egging them on either.
I know the Internet was all about collaboration and opinion sharing and all that, but unfortunately it really does act as a crazy-collector and lets people reinforce already strong opinions by meeting their crew and excluding everyone else. The next few years should be interesting...either people will move on to a new shiny or it'll get much worse as people figure out the optimum methods for manipulating dumb people!
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Re: Dark side of always-on connectivity (Score:1)
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If you have censorship, the ones who control the censors are elites. There's no other way.
Sure there is; automate it and lose the access keys.
Coronavirus authority (Score:3, Funny)
I only listen to what Mike Pence tells me.
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So it's true what they say about liberals and conservatives.
Liberals may have no brains, but conservatives have no heart.
UTI may have contributed (Score:2)
TFS referred to a man with a urinary tract infection who killed himself as the example of the danger of this. From my experience with elder care, erratic behavior is sometimes associated with UTIs, to the point where experienced caregivers who see a marked change in the behavior of a person will have them tested.