The Lying Channel and a Little Mystery.

I complained in an earlier post about the sheer fakeness proliferating on YouTube, and one aspect in particular is bothering me. More and more videos on YouTube are being introduced by thumbnails containing outright, and often outrageous, lies. One recently claimed that King Charles had just abdicated, another that a city in England was ‘ablaze’ due to rioting amounting to civil war, and several others claiming that a well known celebrity had died, only they hadn’t.

It troubles me that people are prepared to lie to this extent purely to get more hits and therefore more money from the advertising, but that’s just the latest example of a sad truth about the modern age – that the pursuit of money outweighs the application of basic standards in nearly all circumstances. What troubles me more is that nobody seems to want to put a stop to it, which indicates that lying on a public platform has become the new norm and is therefore acceptable. Well, not to me it isn’t. The importance of truth is ever paramount.

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I put a comment on a YouTube video recently. (I often do.) It was a simple exposition of a point I wished to make and the grammar, syntax, and spelling were –as you would expect, I hope – impeccable. And it was written in English, as you would also expect, since it’s the only language I know well enough to engage with people. Yesterday I received a reply written in one of the East Asian languages, so I clicked ‘translate.’ This is what it said:

‘Your Japanese is perfect but your English is a little casual.’

What the hell am I supposed to make of that?