From crashing a small plane in mid-flight to hurting animals or derailing trains: everything seems to be allowed when it comes to get notoriety on social networks. While the business of influencers continues to grow, increasingly dangerous attempts to attract attention and increase profits multiply. followers.
Two years ago, Trevor Daniel Jacob became a sensation in the United States by posting a video on YouTube in which, after a malfunction in a single-engine airplaneended up escaping death by jumping into the void with a parachute.
However, a subsequent investigation showed that he had planned the incident himself.
Jacob had become famous in his country after competing in the Winter Olympics, but now I wanted digital notoriety. He was brought to justice for having deliberately crashed in Los Padres National Park in California and hiding evidence. He faces charges carrying penalties of up to 20 years in prison.
In his defense, the influencer He assured that what he wanted to do was create “quality content” for his YouTube channel. He is not the only one who dreams of breaking it on social networks: Today it is the profession that most boys and girls dream of, above being musicians, athletes or film or television stars.
There is no doubt that there are incentives to want this new kind of fame: it is estimated that last year the marketing market influencers It raised more than twenty-one billion dollars, four times more than in 2019.
In addition to money, today the number of likes and followers seems to be the measure of acceptance.
Jacob is not alone in his ambition. Anigar Monsee, a 28-year-old woman from Pennsylvania, was recently arrested by retired acts of animal cruelty against rabbits, chickens, frogs and pigeons throughout 2023. Although this type of content is prohibited in YouTube’s rules, the video giant does not have the mechanisms to detect it automatically.
That’s why Monsee was able to create a community around its violent contents until the complaint came from the PETA organization.
“The method was to start live broadcasts next to an animal and start encouraging them to like and subscribe to your channel. When he reached the finish line, he began to hurt him,” the NGO explained. Apparently cruelty breeds popularity in some corners of the Internet.
This week the issue was in the news again after a 17-year-old teenager from Nebraska ended up in the United States Courts accused of cause a train to derail to record the crash between two locomotives and five cars with coal and publish it on their YouTube channel.
The freight company BNSF is demanding US$350,000 for the damages caused. The video is still on the YouTube channel Capitol City Rail Productions and although it has already had half a million views, it is unlikely that it will be able to raise the sum of money they demand.
In the more than two thousand five hundred comments that was obtained from the dissemination of the case, the most popular is that of a user who comments: “This boy not only derailed two trains, he also derailed his life.”
