This is a re-run of a hoax from 29th July this year, with a new date in the title of the video. The video was originally launched with the title "Why the World will End Surely on July 29th - Shocking Facts". Journalists ran it as a story in many of the online news sources that don’t do much fact checking, but most shockingly, it was run in the online version of the Telegraph. This is a respected mainstream broadsheet newspaper in the UK. The story said that the world would end on the 29th July 2016.
The Telegraph version of the story had a count down timer to the end of the world at the top of the page (now removed) and a stream of fake tweets about our impending doom. You may be able to spot its humorous tone, but the vulnerable miss this. I got many comments from scared people on my articles, asking questions such as when it would happen in their time zone. For them it was deadly serious. They thought that the world was going to end when that count down timer reached zero.
This is the image used by the Telegraph story. It's become one of the generic images used for doomsday stories. It’s actually a fuzzed out version of this image of Cassiopeia A, a supernova remnant 11,000 light years away by the Chandra X Ray observatory. Nothing at all to do with Earth or our solar system!
A fuzzed out image of Cassiopeia A was originally used as a cover image for stories about the "Big rip" theory. The only connection with the big rip theory is that the research for it involved study of the red shifts of distant supernovae, and I've no idea why they fuzzed it out. This image is now often used for Doomsday stories, with no connection with supernovae and no explanation of why it was used, as for the Telegraph article.
The only basis for the date in the story was the video title text typed in by an anonymous youtube video uploader, "Why the World will End Surely on July 29th - Shocking Facts" and a custom youtube thumbnail they made for their video. There is no way to know who did this, as their identity is hidden behind their youtube channel name.The video itself was an unauthorized copy of someone else's work, using amateur graphics, elaborating on events described in the book of Revelations, one of the most enigmatic books in the Bible. This book is so easy of misinterpretation that the Eastern Orthodox church has excluded it from the list of Bible passages that can be read from a lectern.
This story, based entirely on a date in the title typed in by some anonymous youtube user for their unauthorized copy of someone else's video ran as a major "Doomsday story" on many news sites online, and the video racked up six million views.
That's enough to earn the anonymous perpetrator an estimated $8000 to $22,000 from Youtube ads revenue, and it accrued 16,000 subscribers. This is for a youtube channel "End of Times Prophecy" with only that single video on it with different titles. They have now changed the doomsday date to a date in October and continue to accrue views and ad revenue.
This clearly encourages unscrupulous hoaxers to create Doomsday videos which scare vulnerable people. So I’ve done a petition for youtube is to stop running ads on Doomsday videos altogether.
This is not an unusual step as they already do halt ads on videos when they think it would be immoral to earn anything from them themselves. I would say that this falls into that category. It's immoral to earn from videos targeted at vulnerable people who become scared and suicidal as a result of watching them. So please just halt ads from these videos. Those who genuinely believe that the world will end can still upload their videos, so it is not any kind of restriction on freedom of speech, just a decision on what forms of income are morally acceptable for youtube ads.
PETITIONS ON Change.org
If you agree on this point, do sign and share the petitions which I started on The world’s platform for change. They are:
PLEA TO JOURNALISTS AND SCIENTISTS
I don't think any of this can be dealt with by legislation. Instead I have several pleas to journalists and scientists, and also a recommendation for youtube.
The main plea for journalists is just to be aware that your stories are read by vulnerable scared people. Imagine that a ten year old girl is reading your story and going to ask her mother or father about it, and then write your story for her, and that might help.
More specifically, do avoid using words like Doomsday and Apocalypse in the title or the text itself for that matter. Those who get easily scared by such things sometimes send me links to stories about e.g. financial crisis predictions after Brexit, and if the story uses the word Doomsday in the title, they will ask me "is this something to be scared of". They are worried that it is some sign of the end of the world.
Of course this is a perfectly respectable literary trope, the use of hyperbole for dramatic effect. There is nothing wrong with it per se. But those particular words are very scary to some people and I think are best just avoided altogether.
Also please consider writing debunking stories. As the Independent showed, a debunking story can often get more clicks and views than the doomsday ones. Such stories can be written in an engaging fashion. Use all the power of language, and vivid imagery, but use it for the purpose of debunking, rather than to promote doomsday ideas. There are plenty of doomsday stories published every month and if we had an equal number of doomsday debunking stories published each month it would go a long way towards addressing this issue.
DEBUNKING STORIES
Those who worry about these things often tell me that they can't find any doomsday debunking stories apart from mine, since 2012. Please consider writing stories that they can read so they don't get the very false impression that everyone thinks the world is about to end.
If you aren't sure how to write a Doomsday debunking story my outline for a future book. Debunking Doomsday may give some ideas, as it's organized by subject with links to my articles and answers.
Then for scientists writing about asteroids, I suggest that you try running things past anyone vulnerable, for instance a ten year old, and find out what their take home message is from your presentation. You might be surprised about how it differs from the message that scientists like yourself and your colleagues get.
This is a shortened version of my article: Journalists - Please Fact Check Your "Doomsday" News Stories -They Terrify Young Children And Vulnerable People
I have just posted this to my quora blog Debunking Doomsday here:
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