Snapchat Discover Page is Fake News…
When thinking about fake news, the first thing that always comes to my head is the fake 5 mins crafts or the Snapchat stories that make zero sense. One specific company within the Snapchat discover page business is “The Magic Show.” This page/channel has about 5.3 million subscribers and has some very confusing and fake videos that are pushed to the public eye. I want to call them out on all the fake news spreading and false information that they show on the discover page.
Fake news can be defined as an inaccurate, sometimes sensationalistic report that is created to gain attention, mislead, deceive or damage a reputation. This causes people who view fake news to have misunderstood or wrong observation of the “news.”
This is a screenshot from the Snapchat story website that shows a couple of the titles that the channel would use to can people click on their stories. When scrolling through your Snapchat or even youtube nowadays, you will find that the titles and thumbnails are quite odd — making you click on them or wonder why a lady is clipping giant toenails with wacky scissors, only to find out that wasn’t even the point of the whole video that they make you click through. These channels do this is in a marketing strategy just to make sure they get that click to view their channel. That’s profit in their pockets. Unforchantly, channels and creators have taken it too far with how they create these “fake” stories, but they influence people to think differently.
To emphasize how fake these stories can get, I wanted to share a few episodes that were put out by the channel “The Magic Show.” If you have not heard of this channel or seen the snapchat discover page I strongly encourge you to watch just a few videos of what thteir content is like to understand. Here is a link to a page where you can view them- https://story.snapchat.com/p/f090fc8a-42ec-4489-ac6b-5a1a0b7ee49b/2599452002945024
The first video I found that I wanted to point out is from season 4, episode 52, named “She Broke The Law!” The thumbnail was a tall white man that was impersonating a cop, grabbing a white woman in a tight animal skin dress. The thumbnail showed it in a way that made it attractive or sexual. This makes it misleading. Also, this title completely lies because no laws were broken because the scenes are completely fake. But the media advertises as if it is real. Then when clicking through the story, there were multiple signs of sexual intentions. The items that apparently the lady stole were underwear, and she had them on. So the cop asks to take them off one at a time, and you can see where I am going here. The channel does this with most of their videos; they include a lot of false and dangerous activities even sometimes.
Another episode I wanted to share is from season 5. The name of the episode was “ I Never Knew You Could Do This With Money.” During this chaotic episode, it shows a person ironing money to make it flat and then proceeding to put sunscreen on the dollar, trying to, I believe, glue the 100 dollar bill to a 1 dollar bill. Then they put it back on the ironing board and burn it creating a black burn mark on their ironing board! After burning the board, they put the sunscreen soaked dollars in a glass container and put a liter of coca-cola on it. Why? We may never know. But besides that, the thumbnail was a snippet of them ironing the 100 dollars, and you got a whole video on something completely different, dangerous, and wasteful. From these details shown, their channel and advertising are all fake. They use this fake news to help their channel get views and subscribers.
There are about 265 million Snapchat users as of 2021, and with people using Snapchat. If you use Snapchat, then you know that in order to view your friends’ stories, you have to swipe to the right, and below are the channels’ thumbnails to their Snapchat stories. Even after viewing all your friends’ Snapchat stories, Snapchat now automates you to start watching one of the channels on the discover page. Wondering eyes usually do scroll down a little further because you read one of the titles and say, “Huh did I read that correctly?” Then the fake news works in their favor to make you click and double-check yourself and proves yes, these channels are insane, and why do they exist?
As I did more research on The Magic Show, they originally started out as magic tricks, then had a shift to more focus on pranks. Episode titles reflect this change as well. The first few episodes in season one were titled things like “Scary Magic Vs. Giving Magic” and “Real Life Harry Potter Is Back.” Since the shift, though, episodes are called things like “Hilarious Family Pranks” and “These Girls Are up to No Good.” These episode names shifts have gotten out of hand now, the show being on season 5 with 70 episodes almost every season! Snapchat has not released anything on how they filter their discover stories, but there are a few Reddit threads of people voicing their opinion on the channels and how bad their shows really are. Reddit not being so reliable but does have the public opion we can see that people do have a concern and questioning its content. In conclusion, Snapchat dicover page is so full of fake news that even the channels have to create fake content just to make a buck off of advertisting.
Heres the link if you want to read more comments- https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/s3cfjf/has_anybody_seen_this_shit_on_snapchat_stories/
