So-called modern "influencer" lacks basic empathy, cruel to homeless for laughs

[K. A. Pital]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/ ... toothpaste

YouTube star who humiliated homeless man given prison term

ReSet posted footage of man eating Oreos filled with toothpaste in Barcelona

Sam Jones in Madrid
@swajones

Mon 3 Jun 2019 12.04 BST
Last modified on Mon 3 Jun 2019 16.08 BST

Shares
604
Kanghua Ren, better known as ReSet, who was born in China but grew up in Spain.
Kanghua Ren, better known as ReSet, had a propensity for ‘cruel behaviour’, a judge in Spain has said. Photograph: YouTube

A YouTube star who tricked a homeless man into eating biscuits filled with toothpaste and then posted footage of the incident online has been sentenced to 15 months in prison and ordered to pay his victim €20,000 in “moral damages”.

A judge in Barcelona also banned Kanghua Ren, better known as ReSet, from having any social media accounts for five years.

ReSet, who was born in China but grew up in Spain, was among the 200 most popular YouTubers in Spain and Latin America, with 1.1 million followers.

In 2017 he accepted a dare to scrape the cream out of Oreo cookies and replace it with toothpaste.
Get Society Weekly: our newsletter for public service professionals
Read more

He found a Romanian man who was living on the streets of Barcelona, handed him the doctored biscuits and a €20 note, and filmed the encounter. The man later vomited.

“Maybe I went a little too far, but look on the bright side: this helped him clean his teeth,” ReSet, 21, said. “I don’t think he’s brushed them since he became poor.”

The video caused an uproar and was taken down after a few days. ReSet then sought out the homeless man and gave his daughter €300 to persuade her not to take legal action.

The judge, Rosa Aragonés, noted it was not an isolated event and the social media star had a propensity for “cruel behaviour” and preying on “easy or vulnerable victims”. She found him guilty of violating the man’s moral integrity.

According to the sentence, seen by the Spanish newspaper El País, Aragonés concluded ReSet had “humiliated and harassed a much older, vulnerable, homeless person … whose life had been blighted by alcoholism and living on the streets”.

The judge said he had done so “to attract the sick attention of his followers” and to boost the advertising revenues generated by the video.

“I do things to put on a show,” ReSet had told the court. “People like sick things.”

In Spain, custodial sentences of less than two years are suspended for first-time offenders.

Over a million followers of a trash human being. Truly the worst cyberpunk reality of all.

Suspended sentence is no good for sadistic people like him. I think, should've been a real term.

[bilateralrope]

Social media prank culture is pretty horrible people. Lots of criminal behaviour that they try to cover with "it's just a prank".

Pretending to fire Walmart employees. Smashing the nose of a historic statue.

Why are convictions for such "pranks" so rare when the crime is always on video ?

[Solauren]

Because if they were not rare, they'd clog up the court system with trials, and appeals, and then the prison system.

Really, at this point, prosecutors often pick and choose what to go after, to send a mesasge without clogging up the legal systems.

Problem is, the message they send is 'Odds are, you'll be fine'.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Over a million followers of a trash human being. Truly the worst cyberpunk reality of all.

Suspended sentence is no good for sadistic people like him. I think, should've been a real term.

Wouldn't it only be the "worst cyberpunk reality" if this kind of behavior were actually accepted and not punished at all? I mean, this guy isn't exactly some really influential personality. The article vaguely says he is in the top 200 most subscribed if you restrict the subset to Spain and Latin America, which places him in presumably the 150-200 range (if he were less than 150 or so they would have just said that). He has 'only' one million subscribers, which is something at least 12,000 other people have accomplished (according to the first couple of links I found on Google, not going to claim this is a super authoritative number). Once you realize that 90% of all YouTube traffic is directed towards only the top 3% or so of YouTube channels, you can see that this guy is pretty fringe and doesn't necessarily represent any broader trend in the "influencer" culture such that it is.

Further, as soon as he posted the video, there was immense backlash from his fan base, and eventual criminal charges (could he have been given a worse sentence? While I agree he should have that doesn't necessarily mean he could have; to really make an argument about this you would have to actually note under what Spanish laws he would be charged and what those sentences carry, otherwise we are just speculating aimlessly). He wasn't embraced or excused or accepted. From a bird's eye view, you could argue that this is approximately what should happen in a fairly functioning justice system: a young person does something stupid and dangerous to another person and gets punished. I don't see any need to appeal to dystopian fantasies. You could say he could be charged with attempted murder or something like that, but that seems like a pretty flimsy charge for a competent lawyer to have dismissed or argued down to something lesser (which is probably approximately what happened anyway).

I suppose you could make the argument that this is just a random specific case of a much broader and more sinister trend in social media and internet culture. But that's a hard case to make. Sure, there are a couple of cases you could point to beyond this one (PewDiePie or whatever his name is has had his share of scandals, and there was the fellow whose name I have thankfully forgotten who filmed the suicide victim in Japan). But I think you will find you have a hard time making an argument that they are actually indicative of something broader, as opposed to just a natural symptom of what happens when you open a form of expression to as broad a pool of potential creators as the internet has. This doesn't hold any more weight than any previous moral panics, like that (insert popular genre of music here) is causing children to do drugs and have blood orgies for Satan, or that violent video games breed psychopaths. It's a combination of wildly exaggerating the prevalence of fringe outliers and a misattribution of a symptom as a cause.

Of course, you (especially you) might make an argument about how this would not happen in a non-capitalist society. Which may or may not be the case, but is also somewhat irrelevant (and, I suspect, really difficult to establish and defend, though you of all people will probably be able to present the most cogent possible argument to that effect). It just feels like a "Won't somebody think of the CHILDREN?!" moral panic to me, without more evidence that this example is really so nefarious.

[mr friendly guy]

How much does 20000 euros get you in Spain. Because that's how much he is supposed to pay the victim. Would the homeless man be able to move back to Romania (where presumably he has family who could help him out) or get a small rental? Because then at least some good came out of this.

[LaCroix]

With that kind of money, he certainly can - that's almost 3 years of average take-home income in Romania.

[K. A. Pital]

Wouldn't it only be the "worst cyberpunk reality" if this kind of behavior were actually accepted and not punished at all?

It would mean a complete lack of empathy among the members of the lower classes, which would be much worse, but is also a bit inhuman. Empathy is dropping among the youth and psychopathology is on the rise, but I hope it can’t warp people to the extent you describe.

Once you realize that 90% of all YouTube traffic is directed towards only the top 3% or so of YouTube channels, you can see that this guy is pretty fringe and doesn't necessarily represent any broader trend in the "influencer" culture such that it is.

Is this guy pretty fringe? Several examples of other videobloggers being sadistic shits have been posted right here. I don’t know if that is representative of the wider trend, but it seems to me that people like him can connect to sick people around the world: he did mention that he did it to please the fans who were looking for sick stuff.

From a bird's eye view, you could argue that this is approximately what should happen in a fairly functioning justice system: a young person does something stupid and dangerous to another person and gets punished. I don't see any need to appeal to dystopian fantasies.

The issue to me is in the fact you can commercialize casual cruelty like that, I think. Lenient punishment is not the main focus of my worry.

I suppose you could make the argument that this is just a random specific case of a much broader and more sinister trend in social media and internet culture. But that's a hard case to make. ... Of course, you (especially you) might make an argument about how this would not happen in a non-capitalist society. Which may or may not be the case, but is also somewhat irrelevant (and, I suspect, really difficult to establish and defend, though you of all people will probably be able to present the most cogent possible argument to that effect). It just feels like a "Won't somebody think of the CHILDREN?!" moral panic to me, without more evidence that this example is really so nefarious.

Actually, I have raised the matter of declining empathy and desocialization among modern youth; the exaggerated cases of moral panic („games cause Satanism“) are easily refuted, but if we argue about such lousy claims, we lose sight of the fact that there are serious studies which deal with the actual- not imagined - rise in social isolation due to the use of social media and the like. Dismissing such things because there are alarmist, panicky statements does not make the issues nonexistent.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Actually, I have raised the matter of declining empathy and desocialization among modern youth; the exaggerated cases of moral panic („games cause Satanism“) are easily refuted, but if we argue about such lousy claims, we lose sight of the fact that there are serious studies which deal with the actual- not imagined - rise in social isolation due to the use of social media and the like. Dismissing such things because there are alarmist, panicky statements does not make the issues nonexistent.

I'm not trying to be dismissive. If you know of some good sources that actually empirically describe this trend I am more than happy to consider the and change my opinion.

My stance on the issue is mostly governed by the fact that I rarely see any strong evidence presented other than vague or misleading appeals to anecdotal cases, and the type of language used is so often very similar to the types of language used by people that have historically argued for the supposed moral decadence caused by other technological innovations. There's an empirical trap here that is similar to the paradox that faces a lot of research into things like autism (and depression, among others, but as someone who does research in autism I feel more comfortable using that as a motivating example); it's difficult to make any broad statements about trends because the way in which we discuss and classify autism has changed dramatically and is continuing to change dramatically. Is autism spectrum disorder truly on the rise or have we simply developed more sensitive tools to identify cases? Does the increase in sensitivity necessarily correspond to an increase in positive predictive value? It's a similar conundrum when we try to discuss questions like, "Has social media/internet culture actually caused people to become less emphathetic and more desocialized or is our sudden ability to quickly and efficiently interact with a massive cross-section of the population simply made it easier to identify that type of person?" Heck, under what operative definition of empathy are we even using, given how heterogeneous it is cross-culturally?

I'm not going to try and claim that the internet hasn't had massive cultural and social effects that will reverberate in potentially unpredictable ways over the coming decades, and that these effects will have psychological consequences for future generations as they are raised in a different paradigm from the one in which we were raised, but I have just not seen any convincing arguments that these consequences are as purely and unequivocally negative (e.g. everyone becoming a sociopath) as some people seem to suggest.

[Zaune]

At the risk of coming off as dismissive, all I can think about this is that if a mean-spirited but not actually harmful prank involving toothpaste in an Oreo is the worst thing Spanish delinquents are doing to homeless people, they're doing a better job of keeping their antisocial behaviour problems under control than several other countries I could name.

[Broomstick]

The problem is that such "pranks" are usually the tip of the iceberg.

Fact is, that sort of shitty treatment of underdogs has been around since forever, the difference is that these days it's immortalized in video. It's nothing new, I'm not even convinced it's more common. It's just less easy to ignore, deny, or pretend it's not happening.

"Pranks" are great fun to the perpetrators. It's pain and humiliation to the victims. It's bullying, plain and simple.

[Zaune]

Can't argue with that. Still, this sort of thing is definitely not on the same level as emptying your bottle of cheap vodka over a sleeping homeless man's bedrool and dropping a match on him like some local shitlord was in court for in my home county a while back.