YouTube: Where you can experiment on humans as much as you like

Over the course of human history, some of the most memorable experiments are those that we wouldn’t be allowed to conduct nowadays. As with most things, regulation eventually catches up with dubious real-world practices, and loopholes are closed. The experiments undertaken before the door closed tend to become the stuff of infamy, though: Milgram’s experiment in obedience and the Stanford Prison Experiment are both taught in mainstream psychology courses. Part of their appeal is that they’re now forbidden.

As a quick recap, Milgram’s experiment showed that participants were prepared to deliver painful electric shocks to others when someone in authority told them to do so (although those seemingly in pain were actually actors). As you can see in the video below, despite their best instincts, some of the participants continued administering shocks to what would have been lethal levels.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=vXn2SZfwuSc

The Stanford Prison Experiment, on the other hand, involved a group of participants being randomly divided into guards and prisoners. Within days, the guards were going well beyond their remit in punishment of the dehumanised prisoners, and the experiment had to be cancelled early.

Of course, there are problems with these. In the former, participants are put through emotional stress without knowing the facts of the situation, and in the latter they were placed in actual danger. The catch-22 is that with the facts supplied or the danger removed, there would be no experiment.

Despite this, the fascination continues. The BBC actually ran a remake of the Stanford Prison Experiment, uncomfortably blending fact and entertainment, and you could argue that reality TV – at least in its early days – was social experimentation, albeit a sanitised version lacking in scientific and educational merit. If you were in any doubt about the blurring of entertainment and science, both Milgram and Zimbardo’s experiments were made into films released this year: The Experimenter and the less originally named Stanford Prison Experiment.

But like science, television is regulated, and in any case, television’s influence has been shrinking for years. In its place: the unregulated Wild West of YouTube.

The trouble with YouTube

YouTube has no regulation. How could it? More than 300 hours of footage is uploaded to the site every minute, and that means a lot of questionable content is posted – although most vanishes into obscurity. Recently, however, the blurring of “science” (the inverted commas are essential here) and entertainment that was first kicked off by television has been mimicked by YouTube’s prolific stars – with none of the original’s safeguards in place.

Nowhere is this more obvious than with the current trend for homemade “social experiments”. Sure, some of these are pushing the definition of “social experiment” (“prank” or “sexual harassment” would be more accurate), but a few do seem to fall under this bracket, if you’re feeling generous: how people react to someone threatening to commit suicide, for example, or how people react to walking in on a murder.

Interesting? Sure. Scientific? No. Ethical? Definitely not. Ethical regulations can effectively jettison a social experiment in the serious science world, because should researchers ignore the regulations, then a paper simply won’t be published. No such disincentive exists on YouTube, where ad revenue and fame are the drivers of innovation and progress. It’s the Wild West, and it’s no coincidence that the majority of popular social experiment videos resemble candid camera pranks more than serious scientific study.

On paper these may appear to be interesting pop-science studies, but at best they’re cheerful distractions – and at worst they’re worryingly unethical and misleading. Nothing illustrates this better than the recent case of Adrian Gee, an Australian YouTuber with almost 215,000 subscribers. A viral video of his was labelled as a social experiment, and what it seemed to show was shocking. In the film, Gee poses as a blind man asking for change from a $5 note, but proffering a $50. The film seems to catch several unscrupulous types not telling Gee and pocketing the money themselves.

But then Australia’s Today Tonight show exposed that Gee had hired actors for his “experiment”. In an extra layer of unethical behaviour, one of the actors involved alleges he wasn’t informed of the film’s usage, and has faced harsh judgements from friends and family who recognised his unique scars. To date, the original video has notched up more than two million views.

Ironically, Gee’s reaction to being called up on his fake experiments on Today Tonight provides exactly the kind of car-crash watching these “social experiments” do. He then went on to reveal that four further videos were also “partly staged”, after claiming that he’d had no problem doing media interviews about the staged video because “most of the stuff they put out to air [is] all lies” anyway.

It was hardly a sensical excuse, but then he didn’t need to have one. Old media may have caught new media out, but so what? There can be no fines, and no bans: just the usual outrage, additional exposure and YouTube ad revenue that keeps the world spinning.

The internet takes the law into its own hands

Amazingly, though, it does seem that you can cross a line – even on the internet. Sam Pepper is a British YouTuber and former Big Brother star with, at the time of writing, 2,326,844 followers. To be fair, his videos don’t claim to be social experiments as such, and are more on the prank end of the spectrum. Last month, he released a video so harrowing that the internet fought back.

The video is titled “KILLING BEST FRIEND PRANK | Ft. Sam & Colby”, and you can probably infer the contents from that, but just in case you can’t, it involves Pepper teaming up with another YouTube duo to see how someone reacts when their best friend is murdered before their very eyes.  It’s genuinely distressing, but has managed to rack up nearly eight million views – so that’s alright then, eh? The comments are almost universally negative, and YouTube seems to have disabled the thumbs-down counter, which doesn’t suggest it met a hugely positive response.

But it seems Pepper managed to make a powerful enemy in the process: @TheAnonMessage (account since suspended) claimed to speak for hacking group Anonymous and threatened Pepper in a series of tweets to its 170,000 or so followers. The New Statesman records the tweets as reading: “We’ve been notified of a sick, disturbing video uploaded by @sampepper. Yet again, he uses violent abuse to garner subscribers. This is something that we cannot stand for. This so-called prank should bring shame to the YouTube community for supporting this imbecile. This video must be taken down. @SamPepper you have been warned. You have 24 hours or we will unleash fucking hell on you.”

Could Anonymous be the guardians of regulation in the Wild West of YouTube? Don’t hold your breath:

The video is still live, and “fucking hell” has not been unleashed on Sam Pepper, as far as I can tell.

You could argue that what a bunch of internet celebrities do on YouTube is pretty much a cultural irrelevance, and that nobody should believe what they watch online. There’s definitely some truth in that, but with a growing audience of impressionable (mostly) teenagers as the target audience, future world views could be distorted over time. Turns out most people won’t rob a blind man asking for change, no matter what the video told you.

Facebook has recently introduced a tag for satirical sites, to try and stem the tide of fake news – could a similar system be used on YouTube? Good luck with that: there’s a finite number of news websites, but anyone with a smartphone can publish a misleading social experiment.

Vote with your feet and don’t watch? That’s also wishful thinking: people love being outraged, as certain well-paid newspaper columnists know, and as long as the ad impressions roll in, you’re not going to disincentivise bad practice.

Maybe the best hope is that enough shadiness will be exposed to toss the reputation of social experiments down the drain, but in the case of most of these, the ethical pitfalls are obvious already and people still watch.

This brings me back to the genuine experiments of old. Very few people claim we should relax the ethical standards of science, but we still glorify the experiments undertaken before we saw sense. Old media’s coverage of science created this monster. How and even if it can be tackled is anybody’s guess.

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Images: Daderot, Fred the Oyster, Karl Jonsson, Anthony Ryan.