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Last night I decided to watch a video on MH 370 on YouTube. For those who don't remember, MH 370 was that famous Malaysian Airline flight that went missing back in 2014, which was a huge mystery at the time and the most likely explanation seems to be that the pilot deliberately depressurized the cabin to incapacitate and kill everyone else on the flight, turned off the electronics long enough to get far away from the expected route, and then ran the plane into the Indian Ocean once the plane was completely out of fuel. So, you know, totally horrific stuff, also absolutely wild to think about because there haven't really been any other cases like it. The presenter seemed to be a pilot with a European accent, and was going through all the technical reasons why the flight must have been piloted by someone and it was impossible for the autopilot to have done the impressive amount of manouevers specifically to avoid detection, and for that matter vanishingly unlikely for hijackers or anyone but the pilot to have done this. The breakdown of the technical information was new to me, but also, that the pilot murdered everyone on the flight and then crashed the plane isn't really new information to anyone. While the black box has never been found, this is the official theory of what happened outside of Malaysia, which won't acknowledge this as the official story to save face.
So, while there's a lot of conspiracy theories about MH 370, primarily about UFOs or a secluded military base located in the Indian Ocean, this wasn't about that. It seemed like a normal video and nothing about it seemed outlandish at all. And somehow, in the middle of it all, I got this very, very strange advertisement about why I should stop looking at porn, and how it was degrading my masculinity, and how I should click here to find out why.
I don't watch a lot of YouTube. Most of the YouTube I watch is with my husband through the main TV in the living room, like, he'll put on a podcast about knitting or reading or every so often I'll put on a yoga video. Most of the ads are excessively normie, like, literally stuff one would expect on old-school television, ads about Michael's craft stores, eczema medications, athletic wear, et cetera. I barely use YouTube on my phone, and I think most of my watching has been... psychology and psychiatry topics? And even then, I had never seen an ad like this. So really the exact moment I step into a primarily men's interest, technical transit information, I start getting routed to some kind of alt-right garbage. Wow. Just wow. This explains so goddamn much.
So, while there's a lot of conspiracy theories about MH 370, primarily about UFOs or a secluded military base located in the Indian Ocean, this wasn't about that. It seemed like a normal video and nothing about it seemed outlandish at all. And somehow, in the middle of it all, I got this very, very strange advertisement about why I should stop looking at porn, and how it was degrading my masculinity, and how I should click here to find out why.
I don't watch a lot of YouTube. Most of the YouTube I watch is with my husband through the main TV in the living room, like, he'll put on a podcast about knitting or reading or every so often I'll put on a yoga video. Most of the ads are excessively normie, like, literally stuff one would expect on old-school television, ads about Michael's craft stores, eczema medications, athletic wear, et cetera. I barely use YouTube on my phone, and I think most of my watching has been... psychology and psychiatry topics? And even then, I had never seen an ad like this. So really the exact moment I step into a primarily men's interest, technical transit information, I start getting routed to some kind of alt-right garbage. Wow. Just wow. This explains so goddamn much.
