YouTube Videos: Where Is the Line?
When it comes to analyzing YouTube videos, where’s the line?
“CPS stole my baby” videos can be immensely informative. They can be heartbreaking. They can be maddening. They can be what amounts to five-minute slices of the ongoing trainwreck that is somebody’s life. And while estranged parents’ forum posts are much the same, print is more or less anonymous. You have to work at it (or be staggeringly careless) to make yourself identifiable. Video, on the other hand, is immediately identifiable–if not to you, then to everyone near the poster.
On top of that, video is… huh. How do I explain? When you post in a forum, you’re one voice among many. It’s a conversation. When you post a video, you’re the star. People react differently to videos because of that. Videos feel more momentous. They’re statements, not comments. People expect more of a YouTube poster than a forum poster.
And video is easier. So, so much easier. You prop your phone on the dashboard of your car, blather for ten minutes while you drive to the store, then park, post the video, and go get groceries. You don’t need any more literacy than it takes to type the video name. For people who aren’t good at finding communities on the web, who don’t like to read, or who find writing a challenge, dropping a video on YouTube is infinitely easier than typing up a forum comment. It’s so easy that active meth addicts do it. 1
And that means that, well, meth addicts do it.
And people having mental breakdowns. People in the grip of folie a deux with severely mentally ill partners. People who shouldn’t be posting, but are, because there’s no one there to stop them.
People who are just plain dumb, and don’t realize you shouldn’t blare your personal details to the planet on the biggest media platform known to humanity.
People who think the biggest media platform on the planet is just Facebook with moving pictures.
A lot of people I’ve run across shouldn’t be exposed to public comment. Some of them want exposure anyway, and the exposure will make them worse. Some want exposure but aren’t ready for the criticism it will bring. Some don’t realize they’re exposed.
So where do you draw the line?
I’m still prodding my thoughts into place. For example, there’s a woman on YouTube, 22, with three children, formally diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (among other things). She broke up with her ex, and he got the kids. She’s jobless, homeless, dumb as a stick, and prone to flipping out so badly at authority figures that when she gets to court, they propose drug testing her. She’s also pretty good at coming across as a hurt, weepy, helpless loving mother who can’t live without her kids. Her videos would be a great tool for teaching people to look deeper. But I’ve seen how badly she breaks under the gentlest disagreement. I’m no fan of hers, but post her? No.
There’s a family that’s under the sway of an aggressively insane father. Both mother and son are extensively broken on their own, and the folie a famille isn’t doing them any good. On the other hand, I don’t think they’d get much worse unless the attention was way more high-watt than my little blog is capable of. And they want attention like burning. They beg and plead for it. Post them? …I don’t know. Tempting. But I don’t know.
There’s a family whose spokesperson is the mother, a polished, educated woman who had a small following for her beauty videos long before CPS took her children. Her channel has since turned to all CPS videos, all the time. If you watch the videos that feature just her, you can see how the pieces of her story don’t quite fit together, but nothing stands out as the reason her kids were taken from her. As soon as you see the videos she takes in the visitation center, with her husband at center stage, you know why the kids were taken. (You think you know. Once you read the court filing, you discover it’s so, so much worse.) She and her husband want attention, too. They have quite a few enablers who take everything at face value and would also be a fascinating study.
Post this family? Maybe. Mmmmaybe. Can’t make them worse. They’re well insulated against criticism. But would it make the mother even more committed to staying with the father? Is the father too ill to use as a training tool? Does the nature of his illness–aggressive, not broken and wounded–make a difference?
Are things different if the person is the subject of a video that’s meant to draw attention to CPS abuse? There’s a video that frames the mother as losing her baby because she used medical marijuana, but the mother’s account makes it clear that CPS was more worried about her partner’s wee habit of beating her. The mother seems pretty fragile. But she did the video to publicize her situation. What’s more important, her fragility or her intention to get publicity?
Where would you draw the line?
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It would be painstaking, but, are transcripts of these videos an acceptable compromise? These would be just as anonymous as posting something with the name removed; perhaps moreso, as you can’t easily link the transcript to the video in question.
(And your mention of the court filing has me intrigued. What *was* the case there?)
That’s an idea. A lot of the important information is in demeanor, tone of voice, etc., so for some videos it wouldn’t work, but for others it might.
The family had had an ongoing dispute with the upstairs neighbor about her dishwasher, which leaked into their apartment. The father was at home alone with the kids when the dishwasher started leaking again, and the neighbor called police because he banged on her door armed with an axe and a machete. The police found him in his own apartment, enraged and incoherent, surrounded by naked kids putting down newspaper to soak up the water. They took him in for a mental health evaluation, and took all the kids to the emergency room, too. The family has turned this into him being taken in “for visiting a neighbor to ask her to turn her dishwasher off.”
The court papers I read cited him for letting the kids be unsupervised around weapons–the axe and machete. The mother made a video where she claims he was cited for having sewing tools around because he’s a tailor who works at home… and she showed some of the sewing tools in question, which was supposed to make us realize how silly it all was. But Jesus Christ, she chose the most terrifying tools possible. No, lady, your little kids shouldn’t be able to get their hands on those enormous shears, or that wheel with spikes in it. I own some of those tools myself, and *I* keep them stowed away because I’m afraid to accidentally knock one onto my foot. It doesn’t matter that they’re legitimate work tools. THEY’RE TERRIFYING.
The court papers also said the house was full of jars of urine, what little food there was was rotten, etc. The family claims the jars weren’t pee, they were a special tea they were fermenting. They’re woo-woo health nuts, so I’ll give them a pass on that. Their proof that there was plenty of food was a photo of their fridge taken two days later. They admit that one of the baths was non-functional, but says that’s the landlord’s fault. Et cetera. The initial inspectors do seem to have been so shocked by the house covered in water and newspaper, full of naked kids (why were they naked?) and bottles of “urine,” that I’m willing to take their report of squalor with a grain of salt. But only a grain. There’s a lot there.
Plus the incoherent, raging man who took an axe and a machete with him on a visit to the neighbor. You know. Little things.
Ya know, woo woo health nuts and jars of urine makes sense.
Urine therapy, which some call shivambu, is a thing.
They use fresh urine and aged urine.
They drink it. They bathe in it. They wash their hair, brush their teeth with it. They use it as eye drops, ear drops, etc.
Jars of pee really wouldn’t surprise me. At all.
Yeah, Jeff Holiday has a woefully hilarious series of vids about people who are way too into the medicinal qualities of pee.
One could annotate the demeanor/tone, though that’s inevitably going to be subjective.
Thank you for recapping that. And… ho-oly crap. By Nurgle, that’s a _mess_.
I’m super curious now, but I understand your hesitation.
Yeah, the trainwreck factor is high. As is the irritainment factor.
The court filing would be interesting to read.
https://www.leagle.com/decision/infdco20180611928
Ahh…they went full-on sovereign citizen. “Common law court,” the prosecutor referred to in their filings as “wrongdoer.” Sheesh…
The woman who claimed CPS took her daughter over medical marijuana did get publicity. I’ve seen this story repeated in multiple places now, only telling her side of the story and not mentioning abuse at all. What’s most important is the truth, because she successfully smeared CPS, and her false story is being used by a large pro-child abuse movement. I think if you’d write up an analysis of her, it would be only good.
Speaking of, do you read Love, Joy, Feminism? The blog owner, Libby Anne, talks about the anti-CPS pro-child abuse Evangelicals a lot.
The case I was talking about involved a son, not a daughter. Could you point me to the woman whose daughter was taken? I’d be very curious.
Medical marijuana is one of the cases where people might have a legitimate case against CPS. Weed is still illegal in many states, so technically CPS has cause to take kids, meaning trigger-happy or weed-phobic departments could be taking kids from safe homes where the parents make responsible use of medical marijuana. At the same time, it’s easy to yell, “They took my kids because of weed!” when the reality is you’re an incompetent parent who also smokes weed.
No, I haven’t seen that blog! I’ll check it out. Thanks for the recommendation.
I actually don’t know why I typed “daughter,” the only thing I remembered was that they were a child! They could have been a son. And yeah, medical marijuana is something that I could totally believe CPS being terrible about, which is why I believed the case I saw at first glance without looking into it at all. (Like removing children because their parents are poor or Native American.) Unfortunately, I saw what I remember on Tumblr somewhere and on two other blogs during an internet haze a while ago, so I can’t find where it was.
Removing kids because their parents are poor is a topic I need to look into. CPS isn’t supposed to do that, but I can believe it happens. OTOH, twice I’ve run across people who claimed CPS took their kids because of poverty, but one was the folie a famille case I mentioned above where the father was clearly insane, and the other was the Dr. Phil case I talked about a while back where there was a lot more going on than simple poverty.
My research is suffering from a lack of looking at cases where CPS was in the wrong, I confess. I’m more motivated to check out cases where the parent is obviously lying about being in the wrong.
A detail about the medical marijuana case that I forgot: The mother used medical marijuana to treat her meth addiction. The internet sez this is a real thing, but I question whether her recovery is all that solid, and whether she has leftover issues from her meth-addiction days that can still cause trouble because she didn’t get formal help. The meth version of being a dry drunk, as it were.
If you post one of these people, you’re also posting all the people whose videos Youtube associates with them, algorithmically. People whose videos you may not have even seen. So all honor to you for your restraint.
Oh geez, good point.
You can post videos without linking to the original uploader. You could even blur out faces or eyes or whatever.
I don’t have the skillz to do that. Is there free software that could do it semi-automatically?
I tried to post links, but I think I’m caught in the spam filter. Google “download videos from YouTube,” then “embed mp4 in WordPress.”
The 22-year-old BPD sufferer with three kids in her ex’s custody still wants to get back together with her ex, AND has a steady boyfriend who’s about to move her in with him, AND is newly pregnant by said boyfriend.
AAAAAAAAAAUGH
This moment has been brought to you by the WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE, WOMAN Society of North America.
Untreated BPD does a hell of a number on the people who have it and everyone around them. I wonder if she knows that it can be treated (not cured, but mitigated) these days, and if she’d even want to?
I also wonder about her new boyfriend. She’s announcing on the internet that she wants to get back with her ex, but he’s fine with moving her in? Maybe it’s just to take care of her while she’s pregnant and maybe it will help him get custody of the kid afterward. If that would be a good thing. Who knows what kind of guy he even is.
She has it bad. There’s at least one video of her losing her shit at a security guard (with one of her little girls in tow) and a couple videos in which she talks about a traffic stop where she acted so unhinged that at the trial, they wanted to drug test her. She’s in therapy, but she thinks BPD is “like, a mood swing thing.”
I wonder about the new boyfriend, too. Maybe she thinks he won’t see her videos? Maybe he thinks she’ll forget about her ex if he’s a good enough provider? (He’s not wrong. She misses her old life more than she misses her ex. I think she wants to be with her ex because he’s the only way back to her old life, and if she gets a better new life, about 85% of her longing for her ex will go away.) She says he makes good money, which reduces the chance that he’s as hot a mess as she is, but that still leaves you asking what kind of man would date her. Homeless, unemployed, unskilled, uneducated, foul-tempered, fragile, depressed… constantly in crisis… If her boyfriend isn’t a sociopath or her soon-to-be pimp, he’s one hell of a white knight.
Okay, I really need help understanding all this. On the one hand, I see these first-person accounts of genuinely aggressive, batshit behavior from people who have formal BPD diagnoses or who at least, to an amateur, are suffering from symptoms to the point that it’s ruining their lives. Okay. Then I go on Ask A Manager or Leftbook circles and everyone says “I have BPD and I’ve never done any of this” and “behavior is always a choice” and “BPD sufferers aren’t abusers.” Which one is real? I’m pretty sure the first one is real, but then I have successful, healthy friends who think it’s terrible to suggest that people hurt one another because of untreated mental illness. Nobody can explain this to me in a way that makes sense. Can you?
The dichotomy bothers me, too. Not everyone’s BPD is equally severe, so it’s possible that people on the more functional end of the spectrum don’t engage in the kinds of antics that “typical” BPD sufferers do. It’s also 100% guaranteed that people who ARE abusive lie about it. Whether they consciously lie, or convince themselves that what they’re saying is true, or are so disturbed that they believe their own version of events, can vary from time to time and from person to person.
There’s also the idea that if you couldn’t think of anything else to do, then what you did was OK. Or if you were in incredible pain, your pain justifies your actions. Or if you were so enraged/hurt/what have you that you weren’t yourself, then, well, whoever did it wasn’t you, right? People with BPD get tunnel vision, go into rages, and feel immense emotional agony very easily, by definition, so the likelihood that they’ve done something awful and written it off as not their fault is higher than average.
I’d like to say that people with BPD who claim they’re not abusive are deluded. However, BPD isn’t my specialty, and I’m willing to consider that BPD is a spectrum with a non-abusive lower end. That said, I’m not considering it very hard.
If you want to dig deeper into the question, find some regular posters who say they have BPD and they’re not abusive. Read their posting history–all of it, going back to the very beginning if you have to. Do they describe doing anything that sounds off to you? Do they console and support other people who describe being abusive? How do they handle conflict with other forum members? That gives you a better picture than their self-report. Many of the people you research will be too unexpressive to tell you much, but a significant number will reveal quite a lot, consciously or unconsciously.
I think it’s worth considering that where you get your examples will make a difference.
So, if you’re mostly looking at anti-CPS videos and estrangement forums, the odds of someone with BPD being abusive are high, because these are activities non-abusive people don’t usually get involved with. By definition, the common factor is that someone has called them an unfit parent.
No mental health condition is going to come out of that environment looking non-abusive. Like, there are doubtless a lot of people there who were abused as kids, but we know not everyone abused becomes abusive. The non-abusive abuse survivors are just mostly minding their own business trying to get on with living a decent life. They call less attention to themselves, but they’re there.
Ask A Manager, on the other hand, is for people who want to discuss how to have a successful career and get on with their co-workers. That doesn’t select towards dysfunction; if anything, it selects towards people who are mostly functioning fairly well. The common factor is that they have or want a job.
So isn’t it a reasonable possibility that the people popping up in these very different settings actually are living different lives, including how they treat others?
I worry about how easy it is to make assumptions. Like: in my life, there are a lot of autistic people. I’ve seen it happen that an autistic person complains about a perceived injustice and people just assume they’re wrong because ‘everyone knows’ autistic people lack social insight. But in reality, the complaint may be completely reasonable, because how the textbook definition plays out in real life is very complex and individual. And assuming ‘condition’ equals ‘wrong’ leads to other kinds of abuses.
I don’t know anyone with a BPD diagnosis, but I’m very wary of assuming that everyone with BPD is a lying abuser, especially based on observations of a sample that selects for abusers, BPD or not. Dismissing people based on their diagnosis rather than their actions leads nowhere good.
She’s 27, not 22. On one hand, that means she didn’t settle down and have kids way too young. On the other hand, it means she’s gotten to age 27 with no saleable skills and the emotional maturity of a kid half her age.