“’Woo Young-Woo’ Park Eun-Bin’s Oscar, assault, tears,” Is it okay to let fake news on YouTube grow out of control like this?
You can guess if a video is absurd fake news just by looking at the title, but those kinds of channels are increasingly active on YouTube.
“[Breaking news] ‘Woo Young Woo’ Park Eun Bin, the first Korean actress to receive the 2022 Oscars trophy in the U.S! An unprecedented record for Hallyu drama.”
This is the title of a fake news video posted on YouTube. This video, which was posted on a fake news channel 10 days ago, recorded more than 270,000 views as of August 16th.
You can guess that it is just absurd fake news by looking at the title, but similar channels are increasingly active on YouTube because there are still viewers who believe and consume such fake news as facts and thus help the channels’ onwers make profits. Amid growing warnings about fake news from YouTube among netizens, many are also criticizing YouTube for neglecting such obvious fake news channels.
On August 15th, various online communities drew attention with articles about how actress Park Eun-bin, who plays the main character Woo Young-woo in the popular ENA drama “Extraordinary Attorney Woo,” is surrounded by strange related search words due to fake news.
In fact, if you search for “Park Eun-bin” on the portal site Naver, the most prestigious film award in the U.S., Oscar (the Academy Award), which has no relation to her at all, will appear as a related search keyword. Search keywords are automatically completed in the order of “Oscar” and “violence” on Google, and similar search results also appear on YouTube.
Considering the algorithm in which the search terms searched a lot by site users are reflected in the related search terms, it is presumed that many people have been deceived by the absurd fake news about Park Eun Bin and believed it to be true.
In addition, the YouTube channel in question also posted other fake news with no proof, such as “Mao Asada gifted 50 million won to Kim Yuna’s wedding,” “Tom Cruise married a Korean,” “Chinese top star Fan Bingbing, Korean exile,” and “China’s Three Gorges Dam collapsed and 1.2 million Korean residents escaped.” This channel has a whopping 190,000 subscribers, and the bigger problem is that there are plenty of similar channels.
In an online community post on the same day, the writer criticized the YouTube channel for spreading fake news about Park Eun Bin and tainting her search keywords.
Netizens under the post showed sympathetic responses, such as, “This is not even a joke, it’s a creative level of imagination”, “It’s even more shocking that there are so many people who saw and believed such things.”
Some netizens testified that there was a series of damage caused by fake news, such as, “My mom was tricked while watching YouTube alone and asked me about it”, “My dad asked if Park Eun-bin really got an Oscar so I told him not to watch such things“, etc.
Criticism against YouTube continued. FM Korea users said, “I don’t know if YouTube reviews videos when they’re reported. Whenever I see fake news or rumor channels, I report them every time I see them, but those videos aren’t removed”…
Users on other communities also criticized YouTube harshly by leaving comments such as “How can we change the law to get rid of that kind of video?”…
YouTube manages content according to community guidelines such as ▲ spam and deceptive practices ▲ sensitive content ▲ violent or dangerous content ▲ regulated goods ▲ misinformation.
However, many point out that fake news channels are revived after some sanctions, and clearly fake news videos continue to be maintained despite netizens’ reports.
Source: nate
