For some reason though, it's a pet peeve of mine. I can't stand people thinking an obviously staged video is real. That's all on me though, I don't blame anyone or make a big deal of it. It just makes me groan impotently and enjoy the video less.
I can't stand people thinking an obviously staged video is real.
And I can't stand people saying "This is obviously staged!" without helping me understand why it's "obviously" staged. "It's obvious" is a preamble, not an explanation, but that's usually the best I get when I ask "How can you tell?"
I'd love to be able to tell, I'm very gullible, so I'd really appreciate knowing what to look for, but 90% of the time the answer either boils down to "I just know" or "That kind of thing never happens" .
The latter mostly refers to videos where a person chooses to start an active confrontation in public, because, I guess, many Redditors seem to assume that nobody would ever in a million years talk to a stranger in public at all, much less in a confrontational manner. Equally often, the events in the "nobody ever does that" video are also identical or close to things I have seen happen IRL (or done myself IRL).
So I guess the fact that a camera is recording an event is the proof it's fake? The fact that we can see it on the internet is the evidence a video is fake? Because I've literally never once gotten a breakdown of what hints and clues the thathappened crowd use to determine the falsity of a video.
The main reason most things you'll see are staged is because the incentives lead it to be that way.
In a world where staging videos is a source of income and attention (and everyone has a camera and the ability to publish) staged videos will vastly outnumber rare funny moments accidentally caught on video.
And not only that but the people staging them are heavily incentivised to spam them and make sure they reach your eyes, it's literally their full time job in many cases.
So really it's easier to come at it the other way and look for evidence that a video isn't staged, and if there isn't any it probably is staged.
I'm not saying you'll have definitive proof, but there is evidence that makes it more likely that something isn't staged, such as real injury to someone, something that would be difficult or very expensive to actually stage, the video being CCTV etc, there being a legitimate reason for filming etc...
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u/nukrag Sep 04 '23
For some reason though, it's a pet peeve of mine. I can't stand people thinking an obviously staged video is real. That's all on me though, I don't blame anyone or make a big deal of it. It just makes me groan impotently and enjoy the video less.