Want to get your fix of silly stunts and pranks? Stay away from YouTube. That’s the message the platform has given out with the latest change to its community guidelines – the rules that creators have to follow on the site.
YouTube has declared that dangerous challenges – such as the Tide pod challenge (where participants swallow detergent capsules) or the Bird Box challenge, where you do tasks like driving blindfolded – “have no place on YouTube”. At the same time, it is outlawing pranks that have a “perceived danger of serious physical injury”, or pranks that could cause children severe emotional distress.
“YouTube is home to many beloved viral challenges and pranks,” the site told its creators in an update. “But we need to make sure what’s funny doesn’t cross the line into also being harmful or dangerous.”
The change, which will fully apply after a two month period, may have a major impact on the way YouTube operates in the future. It is also a blow to its community as prank culture, often spread in the form of challenges, is a major part of YouTube.
The less violent videos that circulate around challenges – such as the cinnamon challenge of 2017 – are important to YouTube. “Types of videos that spread like this are very integral to the platform’s community building,” says Zoe Glatt, who is studying YouTube for her PhD at London School of Economics.
In much the same way that helping the Instagram egg break a world record for the most liked post on Instagram united people from around the world in a common purpose, partaking in challenges makes people feel like they belong to a group. And as anyone who has spent time on YouTube knows, the site’s sense of community is keenly felt by its most ardent users.
But a combination of creators willing to take risks in the pursuit of fame and fortune and the willingness of viewers to copy those stunts they see on the small screen has caused issues for the emergency services. In the UK, the emergency services receive a phone call about an incident involving YouTube every three hours, according to data gathered from police forces and the fire and ambulance services.
One of the 3,172 calls police received in 2017 was from friends of Jay Swingler, one-half of the popular prank channel TGFBro, who have 4.5 million subscribers, and whose videos have been seen 843m times. Swingler had cemented his head into a microwave for a video; the adhesive with which he filled the microwave before dunking his head (covered by a plastic bag) set quicker than he expected – and expanded too. He had to be sawn and drilled out.
Swingler and Romell Henry, his TGFBro co-star, developed the channel in the shadow of Jackass. But in the competitive world of YouTube, they’ve often gone further than their forebears. It’s challenges like TGFBro’s, where they try and escape quicksand or sit in a jacuzzi full of hot sauce, that are likely to be targeted by the new rules.
Read more: Instagram's grand video plans are tediously familiar. Just ask Snapchat and YouTube
Part of the reason that pranks and stunts are such a crucial part of the platform is their easy virality. Millions of videos – lasting thousands of hours – are uploaded to YouTube every day, with the number growing by a fairly consistent 50 per cent every year. Cutting through the torrent of content becomes more difficult by the minute.
“Pranks are a genre of content that is largely designed to the platform's algorithmic preference for clickbaity and shocking content,” explains Glatt. So extreme videos work best.
Outlandish premises that involve risk and danger attract more eyeballs. This isn’t a new theory but there’s an element of mutually assured destruction in prank videos on YouTube. To beat the algorithm and rise above the rest, you need to grab people's attention.
However, the more extreme the challenges get, the more they start to jar with the public face YouTube tries to present, of an advertiser-friendly place. “The reputational risks are getting higher after all the Cambridge Analytica and hate speech scandals,” says Anastasia Denisova, who researchers the impact of social media at the University of Westminster. “This means that those not yet affected that much probably want to improve their public image – and probably even do good for society.”
Some video producers flirt between life and death – which is where Pedro Ruiz III comes in. The aspiring YouTuber was in a relationship with his long-term girlfriend, Monalisa Perez, who was a moderately successful fledgling creator on the site herself. Perez vlogged about her daily life and her family, but also included various pranks, including eating hot peppers and other innocuous stunts. Ruiz decided to set up his own channel, which he decided he’d call “Damn Boy”, because that’s what he hoped his viewers would say when they watched his videos.
The first stunt Ruiz filmed was his last. He convinced his girlfriend to shoot him. He mistakenly thought a book held in front of his chest could stop a .50 calibre bullet. He died from a gunshot wound to the chest. Perez pled guilty to second-degree manslaughter.
“Similarly to Logan Paul's suicide forest video, this sort of content is driven by the work that creators do to be seen, also referred to as visibility labour,” says Glatt. “In some corners of YouTube there is a race to the bottom mentality. If the appeal of your content is that it is shocking or risqué, then the competitive nature of YouTube means that people have to post increasingly shocking and risqué content in order to be seen.”
The change is therefore welcome in one way – but it’s a blunt instrument to battle a minority problem. It’s also another step away from the core of what made YouTube so popular in the first place – an attempt to instil order on an anarchic, free-for-all medium where people could express themselves in any number of ways. “It’s undeniable that both pranks and challenges are very popular, particularly with younger audiences,” says Glatt. “If you were to simply measure ‘importance’ by the number of people watching, they’d certainly be counted as such.” Cutting back on them may alienate YouTube’s most dedicated users.
This is just the latest time YouTube has had to fend off criticism from its viewers and creators. The site's 2018 Rewind video was roundly criticised by many YouTubers for focusing on Hollywood movie star Will Smith rather than its homegrown talent. It has also faced criticism for announcing a slew of premium, YouTube-backed video series – many of which starred traditional celebrities. And the site has irked many for silencing minority voices and making repeated missteps that look like they're pulling up the drawbridge on young people wanting to take their vanishingly small chances becoming a full-time YouTuber, imposing unduly high barriers until someone can start making money from adverts on the platform.
The new rules may seem like a reaction to the Bird Box challenge, which gained notoriety when Jake Paul uploaded a view of himself driving a car while blindfolded (which he took offline after a backlash), and has seen police forces deal with car crashes, but it has been in the works for months.
Most of the people who matter have already made the change. “This has been a thing for a long while now,” Swingler says. “We did get to a point where we had to filter our content down,” Swingler has said previously. YouTube had already started squeezing channels like his in the first half of 2018, adding age restrictions to his videos, limiting their ability to make money. “We’re still doing the fun, crazy stuff, but less life-risking,” he said.
Updated January 16, 2019: The new policy will start to be enforced by YouTube in two months, not immediately.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
