Ann Reardon

Fake & Dangerous how-to videos who is to blame if someone gets hurt?

 
Join the conversation, vote in the poll on the video and add to the comments. What is your opinion? If someone follows a how-to tutorial exactly as it is shown in a video and gets hurt who is to blame? Is it the video creator? The platform that hosts the video? What if the video has been flagged/reported as dangerous and the platform decides it can stay? Or is the responsibility solely on the viewer? Should they fact check before following how-to videos? If so, where should the fact check? With other how-to videos? There is so much copy-cat content on youtube it is usually easy to find the same thing repeated multiple times.

If a viewer copies this video for making a caramel decorations will they get splattered with hot caramel? Watch the video above to find out.

can you pour caramel on a beater?
is pouring caramel on a beater dangerous

If you have a burn 5-minute crafts says to put tooth paste on it. Just in case you were in any doubt, this is a bad idea. Burns should be run under cool (not icy) water for up to 20 minutes. If it is a larger burn and you can get to a shower keep the burn under cool or room temp running water until an ambulance arrives.

do not put toothpaste on burns

Here is a screen shot from Colgates website about why you should NOT put toothpaste on burns.

Also discussed in this video is the tragic story of a two young teenagers in China who tried to replicate a hack they had seen in a video for making popcorn. One girl died from her injuries after two weeks in hospital and the other is still recovering from burns.

Ms Yeah, the video creator that the girls loved to watch creates crazy ways to make food using office supplies. The videos are not designed to be how-to videos and are made for entertainment purposes only. The girls didn’t follow the video exactly but did appear to use a combination of methods shown in the videos, and those by other content creators. Ms Yeah explained in a post on Weibo that if they followed her method they would not have had the accident. There is a diagram showing that the girls used two cans while Ms Yeah used one can and an alcohol burner. Ms Yeah also shows screenshots from many other videos that use two cans.
Ms Yeah goes on to say that she has been labelled a murderer, she is voluntarily paying the hospital fees for the girls families and is re-examining all the content that she has put online. Although the videos were created for adults, kids are watching and learning. You can read the full Weibo post below.

My Cookbook

ann reardon crazy sweet creations cookbook
Stores that sell my book listed by country: http://bit.ly/ARcookbook
All recipe quantities in the book are in grams, ounces and cups.

18 Comments View Comments

  1. Rating: 5

    I think the solution to this problem is that YouTube should have more violations and warning agiast dake how – to videos that are dangerous and should have a better reporting system of when someone reports this is dangerous and that it dosn’t work and can cause harm to people and should give a actual person giving feed back and not just the same thing again on what they will do of when someone reports the video that’s my opinion it could be wrong idk .
    Love your video’s Ann . I’m 12 love watching them very informational

  2. Rating: 5

    Since it comes down to money, they the Monet should not be paid. Every video I watch talks about if they pass a area of vocabulary or “nudity “ etc they don’t get paid. If the platform is watching close enough to un money these videos, then why can they stop money to videos that end up being dangerous. Some would only take common since from the platform to realize that it’s a dangerous video. It’s the money they won’t be made if there is no money.

    • Agreed, if they were demonetised by YouTube the fake videos would stop. Youtube says that they have no policy against fake content, it would take too much work to scrutinize what is real and what is fake. Similarly they didn’t have policies against running ads on content with heaps of foul language or violence or anything else – until brands pulled their ad spend and said we don’t want to advertise against these types of videos. Then YouTube made a new policy. So brands are the power players, if they don’t care youtube doesn’t care. Hopefully the brands do care.

  3. Rating: 5

    I believe it falls on the person who uploaded the video, unless, like in Ms Yeahs case, where the girls made up their own thing and didnt listen to warnings. It is up to the uploader to provide accurate information for all ages watching. I dont agree with her argument “this was intended for adults” because on YouTube you can clearly see your audience ages (aka demographic statistics within analytics). The 5 minute crafts and “life hacks” channels are popular with children. Just look at Troom Troom! Their entire channel is formatted around kids. She knew kids were watching her video. This is a gray area, therefore I believe the uploader should be responsible as with that we will see the most safety changes, as we can see from past experience that companies and websites such as Google, YouTube, and Facebook are awful about taking responsibility and making changes. That’s my opinion.

    • ?

  4. Rating: 5

    I truly think the should put a warning message before or just stop making video most of the video are fake and I don’t get whats the point if its not true. They made edible candles and i try it and they never worked☹️

    • I just filmed those Alexis ? Agreed there is no consideration for the audience. Wasting peoples time and money. It is just driven by money.

  5. Rating: 5

    The platform is to blame. If you can replicate these very things and say they are not safe, then why can’t the platform? It’s incredibly unsafe for them to simply glance over the material and deem it ‘safe’, in which case a child could end up attempt it at home and seriously harm themselves when it literally could’ve been prevented had they taken the time to seriously review it, then take it down.

  6. Rating: 5

    The platform is to blame. The existence of these videos is an unavoidable result of market forces, but those market forces are in large part defined by the YouTube algorithm and by their content policies. Blaming the channels individually doesn’t solve the problem, since it simply makes space for another channel to take over its viewers. Blaming them as a class is pointless because you cannot punish them as a class nor stop them as a class by legal action, so it would be a lot like blaming gravity if you fall off a cliff. YouTube however absolutely could and should change their policies, and doing this could indeed solve the problem.

    • Such a well thought out answer. Very true, youtube says their algorithm promotes what people want to watch, where as in reality people watch what their algorithms promote. Simply changing the algorithm, would change what was promoted to people. The problem is it is such a big beast they seem to have no ideas what the results will be when they make algorithm tweaks.

  7. Rating: 5

    I think primarily it is the uploader who is liable as they are the ones producing these misleading and dangerous videos. However, YouTube is being negligent by allowing these videos to remain. In a case where someone got hurt then both YouTube and the creator should be charged. YouTube should change their guidelines to cover this issue. If they then refused to act on reports of danger which then caused injury or death they could be punished more harshly which is the only way they’d pay attention.

    • They do have a harmful and dangerous policy, they are obviously choosing to say these videos do not fall under that. Which would be interesting from a legal perspective. If they have manually reviewed and said ‘it’s not dangerous’ are they then liable? https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2801964?hl=en

  8. Rating: 4

    I think youtube and the people who made the video are liable. You tube claims to be a private enterprise so if they can ban content they disagree with then they can be responsible and ban dangerous content. If you went into a business slipped and fell because of something in the aisle the business would be liable. When you go to YouTube you are entering a business.

  9. Rating: 5

    I say both sides are at fault. People should know better than to publish such videos, and people should know better than to imitate what they see in videos.

  10. Rating: 5

    I was just looking at the Stories section of Snapchat and one of them is one called ‘Life Hacks’. Amongst many of them being either really dumb or even just common sense (which sadly isn’t common at all), some of the 5 Minute Crafts hacks have managed to slip their way in and of course some of them are the dangerous ones, like using a drill and peeler to peel an apple. You can report them but there isn’t really an option to explain what the problem is, you can only select from options like “violence” or “self harm”.

    • Yes, these videos seem to be everywhere on all platforms and unfortunately the more people see something the more likely they are to think it is real. I’ve seen the drill apple peeler and decided not to try that one

      • Rating: 5

        Absolutely and the scariest thing is, with the Snapchat ‘Life Hacks’, these are real people (not saying that the people in the 5 min crafts video aren’t real but it’s obvious how faked most of the stuff is) who’ve seen the videos online and actually though “Oh Wow! This is a really good idea, I’m actually gonna try that!” and not only do they try it, the also share it to other people who will without a doubt try it too and someone is going to get hurt, like the poor girls who tried to do the soda can popcorn maker but followed steps from somewhere else that wasn’t safe for the alcohol burner.

        So my opinion on that is that yes, the uploader of dangerous videos should be held responsible especially when people are going to try recreate this stuff that obviously doesn’t work but also YouTube itself as the platform should be held responsible to their viewers safety as well. If someone has reported something as dangerous, the video should be investigated properly especially keeping in mind that so often people do watch videos on YouTube to learn how to do something and people will see these “life hacks” or “simple crafts” videos, see how easy it is to do something and try to recreate them. To be honest, from the way some of the replies YouTube has made to the reports, they are blaming the victims, not the people making the dangerous and EASILY REPLICABLE videos.

        • I think you make a very good point about these being easily replicable, that makes them more likely to be copied.

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