What Is Real On YouTube?

An anonymous reader writes, "The popularity of user-generated video sites like YouTube has given rise to deceptive videos created for self-promotion, advertising, or even smearing rival brands. This latter format, dubbed the 'smear video,' depicts a rival brand's product exhibiting fictitious faults. One example is the 21-second YouTube video entitled 'Samsung handset, easy to break at one try!', which shows a smiling woman easily snapping the new Samsung Ultra Edition mobile phone in half. Samsung says the phone was rigged to snap and the video has now been removed from the site. The article also accuses those who created the now infamous Lonelygirl15 YouTube videos of 'deception for profit. Misrepresenting commercials as independent user-generated content, actors as members of the public, and fiction as fact.' Will user-generated video sites increasingly confront visitors with the disturbing possibility that the video they're watching is not a home video at all, but a sophisticated ad campaign?"

Oh NO!

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean everything on the web isn't real? FUCK!

I am SHOCKED

[soft_guy]

I am shocked, shocked I tell you! LonleyGirl isn't real?! People would actually post videos that are not what they appear to be?!

This comes as a great revelation to us all!

Is this a real story?

[mrn121]

Maybe THIS story was posted by YouTube's competitors! NOW WHO DO YOU BELIEVE?

Real or not..

[wfberg]

Real or not, lonelygirl15's whiny voice made me want to vomit so hard after 15 seconds I "like totally" didn't visit youtube for an entire week.

The internet misleads?

[filtur]

The internet would never lie to me. Did you know that the population of elephants in Africa has tripled in the last six months?

Re:Is this a real story?

[porkThreeWays]

... you just blew my mind man

Shouldn't this be posted by Roland Piquepaille

[DECS]

A Slashdot story not posted by Roland Piquepaille just lacks a certain level of credibility that I've come to expect from Slashdot.

--- Greenpeace Apologizes for Apple Stink [roughlydrafted.com]

It's the tubes!

[spun]

It's the tubes. You see, things have to chopped into little pieces, appropriately called "bits" to be sent through the tubes without clogging them. Real girls can not survive being chopped into bits! So no, nothing you see on the internet is real. Why just yesterday I was hungry and told one of my aides to send me a ham sandwich through the internets. They asked me how to go about that and I told them to scan it in and send it by email. When it got here, I printed it out, and let me tell you, it tasted nothing like a ham sandwich!

Re:What Is Real On YouTube?

[Anonymous Coward]

We'll always have Paris and the tubes.

Better make that, "We'll always have the tubes." Paris's video got pulled for being "inappropriate content".

What part is Real?

[Dolly_Llama]

The part that says, "Buffering..."

Re:What is real on Slashdot?

[morgan_greywolf]

lashdot users are pretty adept at spotting slashvertisements and astrotrufing (better than the slashdot editors, it would seem. Did anyone think "lonelygirl15" was real

What? There are astroturfers on /.? No way!

BTW-- I hear that everything on Google Video [google.com] is real, because they don't do evil.

Re:What is real on Slashdot?

[andrewdski]

Wait, lonelygirl15 isn't real?

Re:Free Sp$$ch

[joe 155]

"I can go online and say "Joe's a butthead" just fine"

You could, but it would hurt my feelings... ; )

Prior Art

[Meph_the_Balrog]

I call dibs on "fake webcam sluts"

I'm pretty sure a google search will show enough examples of "prior art" =)

Re:Is this a real story?

[dosius]

"I am now lying"

-uso.

That's what you think!

[camperdave]

Without the all-powerful profit motive we would all be vacant-eyed lumps of nothing being eaten alive by our own shoelaces!!

Ha! That's what you think. I wear loafers. In your face, shoelace!

mod butthead down

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

Re:What is real on Slashdot?

[Schemat1c]

What about cool home-made stunt video that in reality was just a special effect? Kids are already repeating a lot of stuff they see in those videos, that might not exactly get better when the stuff they try to repeat is impossible to begin with.

We've been dealing with that since The Three Stooges. Just natural selection at work, nothing to worry about.