acab

What April has been through is a nightmare — and yet, in a way, she’s one of the lucky ones. Her video only has a couple hundred-thousand views, not 3.3 million, like the girl in Washington who was arrested after drunkenly falling asleep at a Taco Bell drive-through. She only offers small talk, not futile attempts at seduction, like the young woman in New Jersey who became an online celebrity for flirting through an arrest. And she only experiences a talking-to before she’s handcuffed, not the 15-minute embarrassment of a failed field sobriety test, like most drunk drivers online. The unlucky ones have been watched and mocked millions of times; they have been ogled, insulted, and abused. They are mostly women, mostly between 18 and 25, and mostly powerless to stop their online humiliations. So far, YouTube channels featuring such videos have generated over a billion views and counting.

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I asked the uploader why the majority of his videos featured women, when some 80 percent of DUIs are committed by men. “I cannot control what others want to watch,” he replied, “or what the algorithm ultimately chooses to promote.” Was he concerned, I asked, that his videos might haunt their subjects long after posting, particularly in the era of AI facial-recognition tools? He told me “basic information regarding who got arrested” has always been public, and he compared his videos to police blotters, long a gossipy feature of local papers. I later ask Chief Caggiano about that comparison. He doesn’t buy it. “There’s a distinct difference between the two,” he says. “Say there’s a drunk driver, and they throw up on themselves, they urinate on themselves. That doesn’t show up in the police blotter — but that’ll show up on the video.”

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well, it's not even cops here who are the problem, it's the chuds and youtube