Something I noticed after I watched an episode of Stoic Finance[1] about a possible "impending crash of the Chinese economy" is that YouTube started recommending about a dozen "independent" channels.
I put the word independent in air quotes because they all have near-identical looking title cards with the similar fonts, some variant of the phrasing "The collapse has begun!", and the same-ish content. Different presenters, different channels, same message. Over and over. And over.
Reminds me of the "This is Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy" clip that edited together dozens of apparently independent local news channels saying the same script, verbatim.[2]
You've got to wonder if there's someone with deep pockets trying to influence public opinion on China? Or is it just the same thing as the "local" news channels, where a bunch of YouTubers have been "bought" by a corporation that send them material to read?
I would love to know if anyone on Hacker News knows something about this kind of thing...
The average Chinese person needs to save 100% of after-tax income for >30 years to have the down-payment for the average Chinese house. And, then, the interest payment alone would still be higher than the person's after-tax income.
Either China has to indefinitely grow at 10%+ per year (it's becoming obvious that's not going to happen), or the Yuan or Chinese home prices (~50% of Chinese wealth) are massively overvalued.
>You've got to wonder if there's someone with deep pockets trying to influence public opinion on China? Or is it just the same thing as the "local" news channels, where a bunch of YouTubers have been "bought" by a corporation that send them material to read?
These are the least likely options.
The most likely case is that the channels are all copying each other. Even if they were all put out by a couple content farms, it's extremely unlikely that the content farms care about anything else but making money. The only thing they likely care about is that people watch videos like those.
People trying to make easy money is, by far, more common on YouTube.
I put the word independent in air quotes because they all have near-identical looking title cards with the similar fonts, some variant of the phrasing "The collapse has begun!", and the same-ish content. Different presenters, different channels, same message. Over and over. And over.
Reminds me of the "This is Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy" clip that edited together dozens of apparently independent local news channels saying the same script, verbatim.[2]
You've got to wonder if there's someone with deep pockets trying to influence public opinion on China? Or is it just the same thing as the "local" news channels, where a bunch of YouTubers have been "bought" by a corporation that send them material to read?
I would love to know if anyone on Hacker News knows something about this kind of thing...
[1] In case you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=stoic+finance
...and some copy-cats clips I recommend opening in a private tab unless you want to be inundated with even more clones:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6slQLbT_fNY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-tLenP5NA4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDVNag9Pq7s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JEdz1eA2vQ
[2] Entertaining and terrifying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE