When you post a video, you’re the star
October 2, 2018 6:34 AM   Subscribe

A lot of people I’ve run across shouldn’t be exposed to public comment. Some of them want exposure anyway, and the exposure will make them worse. Some want exposure but aren’t ready for the criticism it will bring. Some don’t realize they’re exposed. Issendai (previously re: sick systems and estranged parents) is a blogger who often writes about abusive relationships and disordered personalities. Recently, she's been watching "CPS took my children" videos and wondering: When it comes to analyzing YouTube videos, where’s the line?
posted by sciatrix (36 comments total) 31 users marked this as a favorite
 
People who think the biggest media platform on the planet is just Facebook with moving pictures.
I'm flabbergasted that people are recording these moments -- "As soon as you see the videos she takes in the visitation center, with her husband at center stage, you know why the kids were taken." -- and then posting them on Youtube.
You can listen to the phone call. You can watch CPS workers make home visits. You can sit in on the meeting with the child’s teachers
posted by spamandkimchi at 6:55 AM on October 2, 2018 [3 favorites]


I'm flabbergasted that people are recording these moments

I'm more aghast that others find enjoyment in watching them, but that's where the "reality TV" culture was bound to lead I guess.
posted by gusottertrout at 7:00 AM on October 2, 2018 [5 favorites]


The Association of Internet Researchers has a wonderful document called Ethical Decision-Making and Internet Research. Key guiding principles:
  • The greater vulnerability of the community/author/participant, the greater the obligation to protect;
  • Harm is contextual;
  • Digital information involves individual people - always also consider general human subjects research guidelines;
  • Balance the rights of subjects with the social benefits of what you're doing and your rights as a researcher;
  • Ethical decisions are made throughout a project; you can't set 'em and forget 'em;
  • Ethical decisions are deliberative; consult people (other researchers, participants, ethics guidelines documents, other scholarship, legal precedent).
Their entire document is well worth a read. There's a lot of great academic discussion about conducting internet research ethically. In fact, there was recently an excellent article in Qualitative Social Work called Ethical decision-making in internet research – Investigating protest groups against Child Welfare Services on Facebook (paywall). She emphasizes centering ethical reflexivity not on who said it but on what was said. She also notes that even though the material is public, its creators may or may not think of it as such (this is often known as "privacy through obscurity"), which led her to asking for permission from site owners (which in itself is another ethical dilemma–ethical decisions are made throughout a project!). She also anonymized her data, which I would argue is essential–and necessary, but not sufficient.
posted by k8lin at 7:07 AM on October 2, 2018 [30 favorites]


There's some interesting stuff about sovereign citizens, too, on the blog.
posted by thelonius at 7:21 AM on October 2, 2018 [2 favorites]


I’m alive! And waist-deep in research on 16th-century Turkey, which I’m avoiding by going deep, deep down the rabbit hole of sovereign citizens and out the other side to CPS protesters.

If I was a friend of hers, I'd worry. I'd say, look, 16th-century Turkey sounds like a pretty grim place, but not as bad as the actual abyss. Do you want it to gaze back into you, or what?

I have a sense of great regret and vague culpability when I see someone online who clearly needs some kind of caretaking. There's one person of whom I wonder every so often whether she's died or gone to jail or not, and I would not be surprised to hear any day that she has done either.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:43 AM on October 2, 2018


"I'm flabbergasted that people are recording these moments --"

I'm glad they are, this is the sort of thing most folks wouldn't dream of documenting in any way and is the kind of human behaviour that might otherwise go unrecorded.

As for the blog and issue of re-posting such videos, I think the best thing to do is re-upload away from the original people, maybe anonymize the videos to some degree, and then use them as teaching tools without opening those people up to the internet maw.
posted by GoblinHoney at 7:44 AM on October 2, 2018 [5 favorites]


And video is easier. So, so much easier. You prop your phone on the dashboard of your car, blather for ten minutes while you drive to the store, then park, post the video, and go get groceries. You don’t need any more literacy than it takes to type the video name. For people who aren’t good at finding communities on the web, who don’t like to read, or who find writing a challenge, dropping a video on YouTube is infinitely easier than typing up a forum comment.
This is something i have suspected myself as an underappreciated force behind the video-ization of the modern internet. But I was never sure and never this articulate about it.

I think it's a shame because video strikes me as a slow and imprecise way to transmit or absorb most kinds of information or knowledge that is focused on details, rather than impressions.
posted by Western Infidels at 7:44 AM on October 2, 2018 [17 favorites]


slow and imprecise

There's another benefit besides aiding those that don't come easy to literacy/writing. Video, while maybe slower or more imprecise, is also much more dense with information. The picture=1000 words holds true and there's a lot of non-verbal communication that can be relayed intentionally or not with this medium.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 8:34 AM on October 2, 2018 [1 favorite]


I don’t think it’s necessarily denser when considering all types of information, but it is certainly more dense with the kinds of information humans unconsciously absorb, process, and even crave. Social cues and facial expressions up the wazoo. It’s the sort of information conveyed when people talk just to talk. It serves a social function, but not necessarily a benign one, especially when taken out of the usual context of strengthening IRL social bonds and deliberately weaponized by reactionaries. (Or Russia; whoever.)
posted by schadenfrau at 8:50 AM on October 2, 2018 [9 favorites]


I'm more aghast that others find enjoyment in watching them, but that's where the "reality TV" culture was bound to lead I guess.

It sounds like the main audience for these is other anti-CPS people rather than rubberneckers, though.
posted by showbiz_liz at 8:55 AM on October 2, 2018 [5 favorites]


I don’t think it’s necessarily denser when considering all types of information

Yeah, I think this is right. Videos that are more presentational, that is to say one's purposefully prepared to deliver some message, often don't contain much greater density of info than text as they are essentially filmed readings. That's where so much frustration many have about video seems to come from. But videos showing unscripted events are often more dense for capturing an event as is, something really difficult to do in writing without paring down detail to a more easy to grasp level.
posted by gusottertrout at 8:58 AM on October 2, 2018 [1 favorite]


On the topic of video info... If people are interested in how changing forms of communication have fundamentally altered information, I recommend Amusing Ourselves to Death. Written in the 80s, it predicted very accurately where we were heading.

I've gotten a lot from Issendai's other work, especially on estranged parents. It's definitely abyss gazing into unchecked issues and a complete void where self-reflection could live. I sometimes wish I self-reflected less... but the alternative.... noooooooooooooooo.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 9:12 AM on October 2, 2018 [7 favorites]


I'm more aghast that others find enjoyment in watching them, but

I don't know if enjoyment is the right word.

I live in small remote community where if you don't already know somebody, you know somebody who does. Lately, a few teens snuck into a few places (nobody locks their doors) and stole some stuff, and got caught. Now there's a push afoot to get them named in the local Facebook group which is proving quite divisive. I'm personally against it big time, because they're young, they're immature, they've been caught and thus are "in the system", because to be (potentially) stuck with the stigma for the rest of their lives feels brutally punitive for what amounts to a few minor property crimes. But good luck swinging somebody who tends to view the world in black and white, who seems to think that if something hasn't somehow happened online or on TV with recorded evidence that's as easy to find as a Google search, it didn't happen.

It's a sickness.
posted by philip-random at 9:17 AM on October 2, 2018 [3 favorites]


Thanks for reminding me of issendai; I loved those posts on sick systems and estranged parents. These videos remind me of a review that someone did of a John Lennon documentary in which they made the observation that you get an unusual amount of honesty regarding the subject of the video when their righteousness, if not secular sainthood, is absolutely assumed in advance, because all the filters are off. That's just what I got from watching the videos in the third link: the parents who alternate between a very performative grievance and a palpable glee at the idea of making out like a bandit in a lawsuit; the social workers sticking to the script as the parents are quite obviously baiting them to try and get something that they can show in court for said lawsuit; fishing around to see if they can get something from the onlookers/other staff members. I certainly wouldn't say that I enjoy watching these people--especially when the little girl is coming out crying, and the mom seems to be crying a little as well, but she still can't stop trying to rationalize her All Satan All The Time monologues that are apparently why she got her visit shut down--but, as with the sovereign citizens being arrested, there's something queasily compelling about someone who's fucked up badly and their only fall-back maneuver is to double down on their initial error, again and again and again. It's like a chant that's supposed to make their problems disappear and they believe that it will work through sheer persistence.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:33 AM on October 2, 2018 [7 favorites]


Oh, I didn't know or had forgotten that Issendai was the author of both the sick systems and the estranged parents pieces, both of which I have found memorable.

I partially watched two of the videos she linked ("made to sign safety plan" and "visit ended") and while I wouldn't begin to guess at what specifics led to those children being removed from the home, you can certainly see that those parents will likely become the most enmeshed with the system precisely because of how incredibly oppositional they are to it.

The dad in the first video and the mom in the second have incredibly similar nasty personalities too - in that they claim things were said that weren't said (but maybe they feel were implied) and then they start banging away at this made-up thing that wasn't actually said, and they don't listen at all, and they just become an endless stream of wallowing in their own supposed victimization.

Which, it's strange in the end that they are recording people - like, dude, I can watch this again and clearly see that no on said what you're claiming was said, and you could too, but that's not even going to happen.
posted by Squeak Attack at 9:43 AM on October 2, 2018 [5 favorites]


I don't know if enjoyment is the right word.

I used it to be intentionally vague since the ethical lines around consumption of other peoples lives is, to me, at least as blurry as concerns over when to share them. I don't have an answer to the question myself, so I won't be more definitive, but I do believe there are some real problems coming from how we consume and judge others through social media and its near kin like Youtube.

Assumptions about what we can know through brief views into other's lives and how we then use that "knowledge" to make sweeping claims that can spread to many thousands of others around the country or the world in some cases is frightening. That it sometimes provides a real good doesn't make it less scary, only adds a competing value to weigh against it; the amount of people harmed excessively to the amount of good provided that couldn't be achieved otherwise.
posted by gusottertrout at 9:55 AM on October 2, 2018 [3 favorites]


After reading a few of the essays, I tried watching some of the linked videos and found them very painful to sit through. Not because they remind me of anyone or anything in my life. Maybe because they do not, in fact. How lucky I have been!

I can believe there are useful observations to be made if the right person watches a ton of these things (in the manner of the Down The Rabbit Hole / Estranged Parents project) but I'm sort of aghast at the idea of someone (voluntarily!) subjecting themselves to this.

I'm going to call my Mom. To thank her.
posted by Western Infidels at 10:45 AM on October 2, 2018 [1 favorite]


I used it to be intentionally vague since the ethical lines around consumption of other peoples lives is, to me, at least as blurry as concerns over when to share them. I don't have an answer to the question myself, so I won't be more definitive, but I do believe there are some real problems coming from how we consume and judge others through social media and its near kin like Youtube.

This is something I've kind of wondered about myself.. not drawing an equivalence here, but when I hear somebody saying they watch beheading videos on the internet sometimes; and by sometimes i mean, on a continuing basis, not a one-shot look just out of curiosity several years ago, I find myself assuming that they continue to watch these things because they do, on some level, get SOMETHING out of it. It may be uncharitable of me to assume it is "enjoyment" but... I struggle to think of a more charitable, plausible, reason.
posted by some loser at 10:50 AM on October 2, 2018 [1 favorite]


oh I used to watch shit like that because I was depressed, and I wanted to see something more objectively real and horrible than whatever shitty shadow puppet plays my brain was putting on with my own anxieties. It wasn't enjoyable, it was sad and stomach-turning and disturbing. it also, to some extent, had the effect I wanted it to. it got me to focus on things outside my own head.

the "I struggle, but" phrasing tends to show up a lot as a preamble to a foregone conclusion, much like "no offense, but." If you're struggling, keep struggling, the world needs more struggle and less self-assured judgment, especially when we're talking about things people observe, consume, and think about, as opposed to things people do to others.
posted by prize bull octorok at 11:15 AM on October 2, 2018 [8 favorites]


things people observe, consume, and think about, as opposed to things people do to others

That we can't neatly disentangle these two categories strikes me as lying near the heart of the original post.
posted by praemunire at 11:28 AM on October 2, 2018


I struggle to think of a more charitable, plausible, reason.

There are a number of varieties of brain weasel that can cause one to get obsessed or fixated on some kind of negative thing, especially where that negative thing is related to some kind of personal anxiety or guilt issue. Like, I went through a period of watching a ton of Hoarders not because I "enjoyed" the show in a classical fashion, but because I felt this intense anxiety that it was going to happen to me and I was somewhat obsessed with either confirming that ("oh my god I also do that I'm doomed") or finding a reason why it wasn't true ("oh I don't do that, I'm not that bad, maybe I'll be okay"). You can have a lot of empathy for suffering and still wind up watching people suffer. I've had other periods where I watched things that I knew were going to make me really upset because I needed to cry about something else but for some reason couldn't until I triggered that feeling from something else.

I don't jump to conclusions that somebody consuming a particular sort of content means the same thing it would mean if I personally did, because it can be complicated. I don't watch these kinds of videos, but I think I have a mild level of fascination related to my own life where I'm seeking to remind myself that part of the reason I don't have kids is that I'm a mess and therefore bad things would happen if I tried to have a family--along with equal measures of reminding myself that I'm not actually a mess in that particular way and therefore I am not the sort of "bad person" who would mess up like that. Brains are weird.
posted by Sequence at 11:28 AM on October 2, 2018 [18 favorites]


I find myself assuming that they continue to watch these things because they do, on some level, get SOMETHING out of it

There’s this phenomenon, I think discussed here in various threads, of people who suffer from a Thing consuming lots of media that specifically pokes at Thing because it makes them feel more normal. Depressed people consuming anything that makes them feel anything at all, people with PTSD or chronic conditions reading about those same conditions, women obsessively watching Law & Order SVU. It’s a thing.

The people who make that media on the other hand? I mean...

You literally could not pay me enough money to be alone with Eli Roth, ever.
posted by schadenfrau at 11:34 AM on October 2, 2018 [8 favorites]


This has been most enlightening. Thank you to:
prize bull octorok, Sequence, and schadenfrau for sharing.
posted by some loser at 11:42 AM on October 2, 2018 [4 favorites]


I'm flabbergasted that people are recording these moments -- "As soon as you see the videos she takes in the visitation center, with her husband at center stage, you know why the kids were taken." -- and then posting them on Youtube.

I think what people need to keep in mind is--setting aside the POV of the fanatic who'll post anything in their desperate quest to Prove Themselves Right--the idea of family life as being inherently private, and especially family struggles being so, is a super-white, super-middle-class-and-up idea. Most everyone else, especially those with a history of trouble, has been habituated to state intrusion on the "private" sphere their whole lives. It reads as degraded, even, to a white middle-class viewer to post such things, because it feels like a fundamental failure to maintain the boundaries of a self or the standards of civilization. But if you've never been allowed to maintain those barriers, you would hardly see the point of trying to do so when you feel you've been wronged.
posted by praemunire at 11:48 AM on October 2, 2018 [32 favorites]


I’m fascinated by these kinds of things because of the complexity of the psychology involved. I work with people who have similar cognitive flaws which cause their lives to be more difficult than they might otherwise be. Seeing a lot of people with the same dynamics can assist in finding patterns which could be impossible to spot without that kind of duplication. Figuring out how they work within the context of them feeling righteous gives uniquely accurate information as well.

These are people who often don’t know each other, patterns which often cross cultures, and relational difficulties which seem to travel in families but aren’t universally transmitted to the children. Accurately identifying the patterns of abuse like this enable people to internalize less and get out faster. Also, if we can find ways to respond to them compassionately without validating their cognitive distortions, we might be able to make a lot of people happier, but I have less hope of that outcome.
posted by Deoridhe at 11:55 AM on October 2, 2018 [5 favorites]


There was also a post (I think?) here recently that talked about how YouTube algorithms will always suggest more extreme videos as you go along, and you can sucked into these kinds of rabbit holes.

I'm try to be pretty vigilant about not consuming terrible things but I got hit by the algorithm recently - I mostly just watch cute animal and craft videos but somehow I was recommended and watched some craft-adjacent YouTuber's "reaction" video to another YouTuber's "controversial" video and kinda kept clicking with grim fascination and watching a bunch about this "scandal" until I was like, GAH! And had to actively go through and reject a ton of recommendations to clear the crap of my page. I didn't care about any of it but it was somehow compelling. Not entertaining exactly, but mind-numbing and felt falsely useful. Like I was participating in something significant, whereas every aspect of that feeling was actually a lie.

My current YouTube thing is craft videos with no narration. Just hands doing things and I turn the music way down. It's soothing without being gross and I'm under to false impressions that I am doing anything other than wasting time in a tranquilizing way.
posted by Squeak Attack at 12:25 PM on October 2, 2018 [4 favorites]


I actually took the plunge and tried to watch all three videos. I was willing to be open-minded and say "well, maybe this is the only tool that less-educated and/or lower income people have to fight a system that stigmatizes them, one that they're powerless against" even when I had to stretch that premise. Then I saw that last video where the mother kept filming her crying daughter. Horrible; I had to turn it off. That was Black Mirror-level of fucked-up.
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 1:46 PM on October 2, 2018


praemunire: ...the idea of family life as being inherently private, and especially family struggles being so, is a super-white, super-middle-class-and-up idea ... if you've never been allowed to maintain those barriers, you would hardly see the point of trying to do so when you feel you've been wronged.
This is an astute and important observation, and I'm glad it's here.

And yet. Perusing Issendai's project about estranged parents, it's clear that the categories "is an abusive narcissist parent" and "has no sense of boundaries" have a lot of overlap. I don't think it's crazy to expect people with no sense of boundaries, whatever their ethnic and socioeconomic background, to both have more contact with CPS and to publicize such contacts more enthusiastically.
posted by Western Infidels at 2:16 PM on October 2, 2018 [3 favorites]


That's why I had that "setting aside the POV" clause. The phenomenon I've described certainly doesn't explain all these people. But I still think you will find that being white and middle-class or better can go a lonnnnnnng way towards insulating a person with no boundaries from state intervention.
posted by praemunire at 2:21 PM on October 2, 2018 [4 favorites]


Interesting that the link between these groups--estranged parents, Sov Cits, "CPS took my kids"--is a similar pattern of cognitive distortion that allows the person in question to feel both victimized and entitled to force their version of reality on others. The author often identifies these distortions with authoritarian personality types, and there is a shared tactic of dominance/bullying that these people continue to apply even when it produces no benefit. I know we have an open politics thread, but just read this analysis of an exchange between Sebastian Gorka and Michael Smith:

"What’s striking is how little insight Gorka has into his own emotional logic. He feels that Smith’s attack is personal, therefore it’s personal. He doesn’t feel that Smith’s criticism is legitimate, therefore it’s illegitimate. And nothing can budge him from it, even 22 minutes of Smith telling him there is no deeper reason. It’s not what Gorka wants to hear. Gorka wants to hear a reason, the real reason. And until Smith tells him that reason, he’s given Gorka no reason at all."

So do all these cognitive distortions add up to using abusive tactics until you find someone who can't resist? Dominance as the only guiding principle of every interaction? Are they truly incapable of self-reflection, or are they getting something out of this type of bullying behavior even if the target doesn't capitulate?
posted by Kitty Stardust at 1:38 PM on October 3, 2018


So do all these cognitive distortions add up to using abusive tactics until you find someone who can't resist?

Our society is very glad to have a pool of broken, beaten-down women to feed to the male version (which must predominate in life if maybe not in the CPS context).
posted by praemunire at 1:40 PM on October 3, 2018 [1 favorite]


Speaking of angry, abusive men. This is one wild ride: A Parent Responds to "Unwanted Contact is Not Stalking," (CW for violence, sexism, racism & homophobia obviously) in which a guy shows up to argue that he's the victim because he's hurting so much over his son's estrangement, which has no possible justification, and when commenters question his version of events, or offer any advice that involves him accepting a shred of responsibility for the rift, he spits vile abuse at them. It really illustrates the rage behind his insistence that he is the sole authority on what gets to be real, and anyone who disagrees will be browbeaten into submission.

I wonder, do people who think in this authoritarian way come to accept new truths about the world only through force/dominance? Like, is everything they believe a result of someone else abusing them into acceptance? Do they try to force beliefs upon others because they come by all their beliefs as a result of force?
posted by Kitty Stardust at 2:15 PM on October 3, 2018 [2 favorites]


It's so unbearable to the dude above that anyone challenges his reality that he continues to engage commenters even though his arguments only push them closer to the conclusion that he abused his fully justified estranged son. He even returns to the page 2 years later (!!!!) to smugly boast that everyone was wrong about him because he's now a foster dad.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 2:24 PM on October 3, 2018


Like, is everything they believe a result of someone else abusing them into acceptance?

I think it’s the result of whatever makes them feel good, or helps them cope with whatever makes them feel bad. It’s externalizing their emotional regulation needs in a very literal way, because they have no emotional regulation skills of their own.
posted by schadenfrau at 3:09 PM on October 3, 2018 [4 favorites]


I think it’s the result of whatever makes them feel good, or helps them cope with whatever makes them feel bad. It’s externalizing their emotional regulation needs in a very literal way, because they have no emotional regulation skills of their own.

I definitely agree with this. Back when I first read the estranged parents posts and got to the part about how they equate "things that make me feel good/bad" with "things that are morally good/bad," I felt like I suddenly understood the roots of a whole range of human behavior that had previously mystified me.
posted by showbiz_liz at 5:14 PM on October 3, 2018 [6 favorites]


He even returns to the page 2 years later (!!!!) to smugly boast that everyone was wrong about him because he's now a foster dad.

Well, that just turns my blood cold.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:39 AM on October 4, 2018 [3 favorites]


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