At long last what was seemingly a tough year for a lot of people is finally over. 2016 sang its swan song and now we are finally in the year 2017. With the New Year people always talk of things that should be left in the previous year, such as societal restrictions, pop culture trends, and even memes. You can look anywhere and find anyone saying that any given trend should be “left in 2016”. When it comes to things that are truly damaging and should actually be weeded out of our culture, there is one blood sucking tick that plagued the year and made a lot of people angry: INTERNET PRANKS. It seems like a simple, and insignificant thing I know, but when you really look at these “pranks” and “social experiments” it is not just fun and games, it is an exploitation of the oppression of others. This exploitation is what gets these “pranksters” their views, due to the shocking nature, but what a lot of people need to remember is that MOST, IF NOT ALL OF THE PRANKS ARE STAGED WITH PAID ACTORS. So this exploitation is an inorganic mess that makes then revenue.

I have a task for you right now. Go on Youtube, go to the search bar and look up “prank in the hood”. Just those words, and see what results come up. When you do this, you will be met with over 3 MILLION results. 3 million videos of people going to the “hood” and trying to elicit a response from the residents in that area (even though as I said before it’s almost always fake).

Here we have a channel by the name of “VitalyzdTv” who got over 4 million views on his prank “Bait Phone Prank In The Hood Backfires!” In this prank our buddy Vitalyzd has a shock case on his phone, then he drops his phone…in the hood, and when the person near him tries to take the phone he shocks them. Most of these exchanges are pretty much the same, ethnic man tries stealing phone, gets confronted by guy, then the ethnic man gets shocked. Five and a half minutes of comedy gold as I’m sure you can imagine. I feel like there is no reason to explain the exploitation in this video because it’s obvious. Our buddy VitalyzdTV thinks showing Black people “in the hood” acting "ghetto" for his Youtube channel would be funny and get him success, and the sad part is: he was right. As I mentioned the video has over 4 million views, and with that, only 8,386 dislikes, compared to 93,229 likes. He even broke 9 million subscribers. So over 9 million people think that his content is funny and wish to see more, despite him making his money off of the stereotypes of others.

There’s another big name Youtube “prankster” I have been meaning to talk about, seeing as one of his stunts made big news. Adam Saleh made news when he claims that on a Delta airlines flight he was speaking Arabic on the phone and subsequently got kicked off (He then changed his story later to say his friend is the one who was speaking the Arabic). He recorded a video while he was getting kicked out expressing his sadness and disappointment. This video went VIRAL, and even got the hashtag #BoycottDelta trending. When you see just that video and hear just that rhetoric it sounds terrible, and it sounds like Delta handled everything completely wrong. But you have to dig a little deeper to see the real story. Now this is all he-said-she-said talk technically, since there is no footage, but around twenty passengers complained because Saleh would stand, and essentially yell in the plane, race baiting people in order to elicit a reaction from the passengers. They did this multiple times until they were asked to leave the plane. While it is gross enough that he tried baiting people into oppressing him for views on that particular flight, it isn’t even the only time. He has a few videos of him trying to race bait passengers on planes into a reaction, such as yelling in Arabic counting back from ten. Then he also faked a racial profiling video (once it was outed as fake he changed the description to say it was fake the whole time and the viewers were misunderstood), in which he wore traditional Islamic garbs and walked down the street, where and “NYPD officer” stop and frisked them. Now while stop and frisk and racism on airlines are big problems, he is in no way helping. He is just throwing out these videos because of their ability to be shared like rapid fire. Now as I said, there’s no way I can know the truth to what happened on that Delta flight, as I was not there, and it wasn’t filmed, I believe wholeheartedly that Saleh is just exploiting oppression for his gain. Bigotry exists, but it isn't fair to call wolf when you are the one baiting people into it. He is misleading his viewers, and the people in his videos. Now I can acknowledge that I do not face the same problems he does because I am not Arabic and I do not know what his real life struggles are. But I can also acknowledge that trying to exploit the struggle that people, such as himself, deal with for a payout from his 2 and a half million subscribers is a disgusting thing.