cosecantphi [he/him]

  • 2 Posts
  • 6 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 27th, 2020

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  • Veritasium

    Sucks about this guy, he used to actually make interesting pop-sci videos without mangling the concepts and conclusions too badly. It was a breath of fresh air compared to the bullshit other science popularizers like Michio Kaku were dreaming up at the time. But nowadays his videos all have these extremely vague clickbait titles. And much worse than that: he clearly shills tech from sponsored companies. Not with marked sponsorship segments, but with entire videos that are essentially long form advertisements with all of the disinformation marketing entails. Other than the word sponsor being highlighted and placed before the title, there is no indication for his audience that they shouldn’t view such sponsored videos as normal Veritasium videos.

    The most blatant example of this was when he shilled for Waymo self driving ride share cars in an 18 minute video they sponsored. It was about two years ago, the title:

    Why You Should Want Driverless Cars On Roads Now

    Here’s a video detailing the ways in which Veritasium misleads his audience to produce corporate propaganda using the driverless car video as its main example. It’s an hour long, but I still recommend giving it a watch because it’s so thorough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM0aohBfUTc

    I’m sure Veritasium does still make good, well researched and well intentioned videos, but after seeing the way he intentionally manipulates his audience in certain videos, I can’t help but be distrustful of everything he says elsewhere.