It’s been three and a half months since the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard defamation trial ended with a victory for Depp. But Heard’s professional haters on YouTube can’t seem to quit her, putting out dozens of videos a day blasting her in any way they can think of; racking up millions of views in the process. I found more than a hundred of these videos posted just today (9/15/22).
For a non-inconsiderable number of YouTubers, hate against Heard is virtually all they do; others mix it up with different content. And they’re prolific. A recent report from internet research firm Bot Sentinel noted that one channel has put out 128 videos attacking the actress for such alleged failings as “psycho eyes” and “gross” lips. “”Burn her to the ground,” the anonymous man behind the channel advised in one video.
But Amber Heard isn’t the only woman whose haters have gone pro. Another favorite victim is Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, who is hated by many white people for, well, I’m sure you can guess why. As Bot Sentinel notes:
Multiple channels with millions of views were dedicated to publishing malicious and defamatory content about … Markle.
If anything the Markle haters are more prolific than even Heard’s. Here, from the Bot Sentinel report, are some quick facts about a couple of channels devoted almost exclusively to anti-Markle content — and who were rewarded with tens of millions of views for their, er, service.
What drives the haters to produce this flood of anti-Amber content, many of them on YouTube channels devoted almost exclusively to hating on the actress? The answer may be as simple as cold hard cash: you can earn a lot of money making Heard’s and Markle’s lives worse.
Looking at just the top five “single-purpose hate channels” aimed at Markle, Bot Sentinel told Rolling Stone that they estimated these channels were collectively making more than $500,000 a year — that’s an average of $100,000 going to each channel. Again, that’s just five channels out of dozens devoted to the Duchess.
The Bot Sentinel makes the case that many of these videos seem to blatantly violate assorted YouTube rules designed to curtail harassment and hate. But that doesn’t mean that YouTube will take them down. After the report came out earlier this week, Newsweek asked YouTube to take a look at one particularly nasty anti-Heard account that has published videos with titles like ““NEW Texts & Insighter [sic[ Photos REVEAL Amber Exploiting Celebs With S*x!” and “New RUMOUR: Amber’s Baby Was Only A PR Stunt To Gain PITY!”
YouTube said the videos looked fine to them. “Upon review, the flagged videos do not violate our Community Guidelines or our advertiser-friendly guidelines,” a spokesperson told Newsweek.
Maybe you guys need some new rules then, huh?
NOTE: Bot Sentinel once did some work for Heard, but says no one paid them to do this new report, which FWIW only mentions Heard once.
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Fun law fact:
Lilibet Mountbatten-Windsor is constitutionally* eligible to be both Queen and President of the United States.
Speculative fiction writers, knock yourself out.
(* Both constitutions. That single sheet US one, and our one that we’ve done on a series of post-it notes that we’ve stuck around somewhere)
Whether at the same time has been the subject of discussion.
@Alan: Interesting, but what do you think of these hate channels?
I wonder if they’re bots?
How much of that $500,000 is Google skimming off the top, do you think?
You Tube has always sucked.
Okay, I’m going to get some hate for my comment here judging from my previous experience on here about disagreeing with other commenters. How do you propose that Youtube change their harassment policies to crack down on these channels?
The reason why Youtube did not find the Just In channel to not be in violation of their hate or harassment policies is that, while their is a lot of negative content about Heard, they are not specifically asking viewers to go and harass her. How do you draw the line between harassment and negative coverage of a celebrity, is all negative coverage of celebrities going to be considered harassment now? I haven’t seen the anti-Markle videos, so I don’t know about that, though I do think that the “Just In” channel is breaking a different Youtube policy regarding misleading and click-baity titles and thumbnails, though their harassment policy might not be one of them.
@Alan Robertshaw: It’s been jokingly suggested that the late Queen was playing the long game to bring the US back into the Empire.
And look who shows up, on cue, to defend Depp stans once again …
One of the not-single-purpose hate-channels in that report is apparently That Umbrella Guy.
Well, that asshole is jumping to one fandom connected misogynistic hate to another since at least comicsgate (he hated on various comics pros, Brie Larson, Star Wars etc.). And somehow still has a channel.
He also loves to claim he was doxxed almost annually. Truth is he accidentally released his own personal info around 2019 when he attempted to trademark the user/penname of the cosplayer/trollbaiter Renfamous.
https://twitter.com/renfamous/status/1541221079666069505
Ah, someone’s using the old “I’m not touching her” defense heard from the back seats of cars for decades now.
“They’re not saying to harass her in the hundreds of videos they produce to demonize her, so are they really guilty?”
@Surplus to Requirements, Perhaps you’ve been living under a rock recently but I’ve posted comments on multiple blogposts here and it’s only on this issue that I’ve been controversial and those ones you haven’t responded to.
I’m not defending anyone though, the specific Youtube channel mentioned by Newsweek is only posting their boring videos for clicks and their titles give false and misleading information and don’t even reflect what’s in the videos (which are probably put together by AI and bots anyway).
@Tabby Lavalamp, I get what you’re saying but that’s not what I’m saying. What I want to know is that if you consider any content on Youtube to be hateful, then what in their already existing community guidelines need to change in order to crack down on them and I was only talking about the specific channel mentioned by Newsweek, that Youtube claimed didn’t violate their guidelines on hate speech and harassment.
According to the guidelines on hate speech:
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2801939#protected_group
and the guidelines on harassment and cyberbullying:
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802268?hl=en&ref_topic=9282436
There’s a lot of actual problematic content on Youtube, though if you believe that to be the case for anything in particular, then we need to be clear which of these policies it violates. If it’s not covered by them then we also need to be clear what needs to change or how they need to be updated. Hate speech, including misogyny is already prohibited by Youtube’s policies but then you have to show that they’re promoting hate specifically based on protected group status according to their current policy.
Do you really think this would be happening if Heard and Markle were men?
So, it’s based on an intrinsic attribute (gender) and it sure seems to be prolonged and targeted …
@Surplus of Requirements, No, actually I don’t think it would be happening if they were men. You could argue that people go after women that they disapprove more aggressively than men they disapprove of but when judging individual videos, that alone becomes very subjective. Youtube admins have to make a judgement to distinguish between actual hate speech and people who just have a negative opinion of someone.
Get real. Everyone can see that it’s an organized harassment campaign. Except, apparently, you.
Youtube has sadly become a large market place for right wing grifters. I think it happened when tiktok became popular because most of the younger more progressive people went there instead and then the neckbeard basement dwellers took over youtube. And youtube refuses to crack down on it.
@Surplus: I’m with you.
TikTok … is that that Chinese spyware thingy I’ve heard about?
Meanwhile, I am continuing to have some rather peculiar difficulties with Windoze 10.
1: MSOffice-associated cruft keeps running automatically and causing significant slowdowns, usually due to memory usage. I don’t use it (and I don’t think it’s even fully installed/”activated”, which I’ll bet you have to pay extra to do) so I disabled all Office items in Task Scheduler as well as Services. This seems to have stopped OfficeClickToRun.exe from spawning at random times (unbidden by my (non-)use of any Office app) but that blasted hxtsr continues to often launch itself when the machine is left idle, and then as soon as I return and touch anything it spazzes out using loads of CPU and memory for about five minutes and then exits, until the next time the machine is left idle.
2: The weather/news widget in the lower right taskbar area has changed some aspects of its behavior in the past few days, and the photo viewer interface has some changes that appeared in the past 24 hours. Throughout this interval, a) Windoze Update has been set to paused (with the end date in mid-October) and b) the internet connection has been configured as “metered”. Either of those alone should prevent Windoze from downloading and applying updates, let alone both at once. Yet it seems that at least two of the bundled applications have somehow received patches within the past few days, at least one of them within the past single day. How did this happen? And how can it be forced to respect the paused-or-not updates setting? Otherwise it’s sure to trigger an unwanted reboot with one of these rogue updates, sooner or later, probably while I’m in the middle of doing something delicate and/or have unsaved changes somewhere. And of course any update that sneaks through might introduce a new bug and it could be a doozy that seriously interferes with my activities, which is why people pause updates until nearly the next Patch Tuesday and only then install them, so someone else can be MS’s unpaid beta tester instead.
3: The aforementioned news widget does not respect the default browser setting. Clicking anything in it launches Edge, even if the default browser has been set to Firefox in the Windoze control panel.
4: There are some odd behavioral issues with task switching via alt-tab. Specifically, switching to a task does not always move that task to the front of the alt-tab list. And whether it does or not appears to be essentially random. This has significant consequences. For example, I can click Thunderbird in my taskbar, find it not immediately responsive, hit alt-tab to switch back to something else (likely Firefox) to do things there for another minute or so intending to then return to Thunderbird and see if it’s feeling more cooperative, and have that alt-tab bring up some random Explorer window or GIMP or something instead.
5: Thunderbird and Windoze 10 don’t seem to get on especially well. TB works, to be sure, doing its job as well as it did on W7, but on W10 it has this peculiarity where one must switch to it, then to something else, and then back to it to get it fully input-focussed, versus the “just switch to it once” method that worked with TB on W7 (and every other app on both OSes). And of course this tends to interact nastily with the buggy alt-tab behavior in item number four. (On the initial switch to TB, its window will become frontmost but won’t see mouse inputs, e.g. no highlight following the pointer when moving over the list of accounts and mail folders at left. This occurs on W10 but not W7. Switching away and promptly back again usually fixes this promptly, but the problem will reappear after TB has been backgrounded again for some sufficient interval of time.)
6: From Windoze 95 through to, and including, Windoze 7, the start menu worked quite simply: a) point at it at lower left, b) click, c) menu appears and you can launch stuff. On Windoze 10, it’s now a) point at it at lower left, b) click, c) nothing happens, d) click-click-click-click-click…, e) menu eventually appears after some click finally registers, f) menu then flickers in and out of existence several times as some more of your clicks register until you stop clicking because you’ve seen it appear, g) 50/50 whether the end state has the menu displayed or dismissed, h) and in the latter case, time to do all this over again …
7: The photo viewer leaks memory like a sieve. It doesn’t always exit fully when closed, but even killing it from task manager doesn’t return the leaked memory, which is credited to Explorer and/or something called “sihost” instead of to the photo viewer itself. And there’s no way to restart Explorer without either a) a full reboot of the machine or b) losing all open folder windows and having to spend 20 minutes recreating them all afterward.
Any suggestions on how to fix/tame any of the above behaviors would be appreciated.
@Surplus to Requirements,
Honestly, the last version of Windows that I used was Windows XP. After that it was either Linux or Mac. Isn’t there setting on Windows that either prompts you before installing updates or allows you to install them in your own time. Maybe that would be better than the “pause” setting. Windows used to have this annoying habit of installing updates whenever it felt like, including times when it was inconvenient.