Business Insider Just Used My Badly-Edited ‘American Sniper’ Video in a Real News Story
One year ago, I made an alternate cut of the movie American Sniper. In my version, Bradley Cooper’s character, Chris Kyle, casually shoots people while talking on the phone with his wife. At the advice of a friend, I gave the video a title with grammatical case issues and an intentional misspelling, so people might mistake it for a video uploaded by a fan of American Sniper.
This video is clearly not a scene from the real movie. In the video, Cooper’s character casually shoots some people — including a child — while talking dirty to his wife. And if I’m being honest, the editing is crap. No one should be duped by this.
In fact, some very astute YouTube users noticed that the clip was edited.
All great points. Unfortunately, some less astute people at Warner Brothers bought ad space on the video.
Ok, let’s chalk this one up to an algorithm. Warner Brothers has some opportunistic script running around YouTube, buying ads on American Sniper fan videos. It’s funny that they’re advertising on this video, but the decision to do so was probably not made by a human person.
But guess what happened then? A human person went and used the video in a real news story!!
Last week, Business Insider linked to the video in their article, “6 movie scenes that show what military families go through.” I repeat, Business Insider used an obviously fake, badly edited video where a person casually shoots people while talking dirty to his wife as an example of “what military families go through.”
This is exactly why I make stupid bullshit and put it on the Internet. For every Potato Salad, there are going to be dozens of Jet Skis. For every tweet that gets you a hundred retweets, there are hundreds more that no one else cares about. It can be really lonely at times. But all of the loneliness is worth it when a major media company earnestly links to your badly-edited video of an American hero apathetically bulls-eying enemy combatants while having phone sex with his wife. Thank you, Warner Brothers and Business Insider, for being less perceptive than most YouTube commenters and making my day.
