YouTube Is Littered With Mass-Produced Videos Made By Automated Bots (hackernoon.com)

A report via Hacker Noon sheds some light on the practice of using bots to mass-produce videos for YouTube. The YouTube channel Breaking News Today, for example, constantly generates new videos from recent news sources, and posts as often as every few minutes. You can tell the videos are bot-produced because they always start off with a cringe-worthy 80's style intro, followed by a robotic voiceover and floating low quality images. From the report: Someone has effectively created a fully automated process running 24/7 that is taking and stripping recent articles, converting them into video format, and posting it on Youtube as their own. And while doing so, they take credit for it and reap all the rewardsâS -- such as revenue and influenceâS -- âSthat come with it. Some videos, especially the ones that gain momentum and get popular, even feature a large juicy ad on the bottom, in which Google displays and shares profits with. Sure, one video with a few thousand views isn't really that significant, but when you have hundreds of videos being pumped out week after week, you can see how quickly things can add up. And while many new videos are still awaiting their first dozen views, others are in the tens of thousands. One even amassed almost 50k views in just two days. In total, the channel's videos have been viewed more than 225,000 times just in the past month, with an average of around 8,000 views per day. Did I mention that there are more than just this one channel? There's also this one, and this one, both following the same concept. There's actually many, MANY more. There are few solutions to deal with this new type of fully automated plagiarism. While you can certainly down vote the videos and report them to YouTube if the uploader is infringing on your copyright, they will likely stay online for days racking up views and revenue before any action is taken. There's also no reason why the videos couldn't be uploaded to separate channels to fly under YouTube's radar.

Comments

Re:Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

I remember the "Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama gave Russia 20 percent of our uranium" story.

The claim (by Donald Trump and others) is that Hillary Clinton approved a deal giving a Russian company named "Rosatom" 20 percent of our uranium.

But that's not true. The Clinton State Department had no power to veto or approve the Rosatom transaction, AKA "Uranium One". It could do neither. Here’s how it does work:

Uranium One is the name of a South Africa-based mining company.

Back in 2007 it merged with "Urasia Energy" based in Canada. And in 2010 the mining arm of the Russian nuclear agency Rosatom, bought controlling interest in the company. Among other places, that mining company had operations in Wyoming that amounted to what the Nuclear Regulatory Commissions or the NRC said was at the time was about 20% of the uranium production capacity in the U.S.

By law, when a foreign company wants to buy ANYTHING with potential national security implications, an interagency committee of the federal government must approve it. The committee was given a broad mandate under President Reagan to advise the president on foreign investment transactions.

That committee is called CFIUS (Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States). It includes nine department heads. The Secretary of the Treasury is the chair person. The rest are the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, Commerce, Defense, State and Energy, plus the Office of U.S. Trade Representative, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. That’s CFIUS. The nine department heads all approved the sale of Uranium One.

It was unanimous - not a Hillary Clinton approval.

Also, the State Department wasn't even represented by Hillary Clinton at CIFUS. The Assistant Secretary of State, Jose Fernando, represented the State Department on CFIUS, not Hillary Clinton. And Jose Fernando stated that Clinton never intervened.

Further, neither Secretary Clinton nor the committee as a whole could stop any deal of this kind, even if they wanted to.

The committee members evaluate the sale of anything potentially related to national security.

By law, if just one member objects, the president and only the president can veto such a transaction. No committee member of the nine objected.

The whole "Uranium One" accusation is predicated on the charge that "Secretary Clinton approved the sale". She did not, and more to the point, she couldn't because the as Secretary of State, she didn't have the power to do that.

This whole "Clinton and Obama gave away our uranium" thing is just plain bullshit.

Go ahead, think whatever you like. Don't take my word for it. These are the facts and you can verify all of them by spending a minute or two on Google.

That was just one example of a lie that was made up out of whole cloth to damage a candidate. Clinton wasn't the only one hit with these stories. Remember the "Ted Cruz's father was with Lee Harvey Oswald" story? It was pure bullshit too, and we all know it.
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