*promote

Self promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Monday, July 11th, 2016 9:27am PDT - promote requested by original submitter hermannthegerman.

the reason these videos are believable is because of the production value of them (and the subsequent degradation via youtube encoding). i've called out one or 2 of these as real because i know how much work it takes to do that level of realism and it was incredibly unlikely a team that large and that professional would spend that much time/effort/money just to make a fake video or make a point. i guess i was wrong.

the shark one was really well done and would have been a pain in the ass to do.

Suck on those lion balls swinging in the breeze.

Pretty tenuous to call this an experiment... What hypothesis were they testing, that people watch and share exciting content? That video editing technology is fairly advanced by now but certainly not flawless?

They seem to start off with some media criticism - 'how much of the news should you believe -' but then lose that trail since A) all of their videos were questioned and called out by many as fake, and B) everybody already knows that the 'news' section of the show is over when the anchors are just reacting to fun videos they found online.

I'm fine with this video being an example of well scripted VFX to maximize virality for virtality's sake, but it's pretty goofy to call it an experiment. The best part was the cameo by TV's Frank.

I've seen a few of these on the sift at least, and I remember a number of us were sceptical. A lot of the time you don't want to be the party pooper that ruins it for everyone by whinging about something being fake.

I think a lot of the time people call things fake but can't quite explain why they think it is too, and I put that down to a subtle reading of things like:
- how likely is that to have happened?
- were the actors behaving within normal parameters for the context? (people hanging around with cameras or props, bears chasing people when they normally wouldn't)
- was there anything to gain out of a successful video? (associated youtube channel)
- did people hit cues and say things that were too perfect?
- if you can't see a cut, can you see an obvious place for a GOOD cut that you missed?
- how hard is it to fake?

What with humans being sociable animals and our evolutionary success is tied to interacting with other humans, I think by and large we're pretty good at spotting bullshit. It takes a very very good fake to trick the majority.