Slaves to the Algorithm

Many people think Greg Chism is a freak — or worse. He says he was just following the incentives of the platform.

I promised Greg Chism I wouldn’t reveal anything about where he lives because there are people out there obsessed with him, convinced he’s a monster. What I can say is that my GPS took me from my hotel somewhere in the American Midwest to an upscale, spacious home with well-kept lawns. Greg was waiting for me in his driveway, an unassuming, friendly, ordinary father of two in his mid-50s, wearing a Van Halen sweatshirt and blue jeans. His smile faded as I jumped out of my car. He had agreed to meet me, but now he looked uneasy. He had never given an interview about the events that overtook his life in 2016 and 2017.

Greg took me inside and showed me his den — a shrine to his two great loves, Hot Wheels and Tom Petty. He led me through to his home office. We sat at his desk, and I turned on my recorder. It was 10 a.m. He had bottled up his story for seven years, and we didn’t stop talking until his younger daughter, Annabelle, arrived home from school at 4 p.m., beginning with his childhood in Granite City, Ill. [...]

In 2013, Greg created a channel, Geek to Freak Lawn Care, and filmed himself performing good Samaritan lawn work. If he saw a lawn in need, he would jump out of his truck and blow away the dead leaves or trim the edges and then vanish like the Zorro of lawn care chores. In other videos, he created a kind of lawn care ASMR, meditatively mowing back and forth, up and down, for hours at a time.

“I was posting one a week, and they were getting a hundred thousand views or more,” Greg said.

Sometimes Greg was interviewed by fledgling lawn care influencers, and the respect he had gained in the lawn care world was palpable. In one video, the interviewer Keith Kalfas — “the World’s Leading Landscaping & Window Cleaning Influencer” — called Greg the lawn care GOAT. When Greg attended a lawn care convention in Kentucky in 2014, the crowd went wild for him. A meet and greet was organized at a pizza place. “Dude, all these people were waiting for me,” Greg said. “And they all gave me their lawn care shirts so I could wear them in my videos. It was insane.”

But Greg’s story was about to spiral in bizarre and unexpected ways. In 2015, YouTube Kids debuted. It was pitched as a safe and educational experience for children. Stressed parents could leave it on autoplay, and their kids could watch hours of Peppa Pig or nursery‑rhyme videos. But by 2017, things had taken a disconcerting turn. Parents began reporting that they would leave their children for a while and return to find them being fed videos called “Mickey Mouse Baby Dead in Gas Explosion” or “Elsa Spiderman Attacked by Sharks.”

In these cartoons, Peppa Pig was no longer having normal Peppa Pig adventures. Instead, she was being tortured at the dentist, or worse, eating her own father, with blood spurting everywhere. [...]

As James Bridle put it in a viral 2017 essay that drew attention to the phenomenon, “Something Is Wrong on the Internet”: “Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatize and abuse children, automatically and at scale.”

You might be thinking it was just the work of trolls, bored misanthropes skewing the YouTube Kids algorithm for their own nihilistic pleasure. But as Chelsey Weber-Smith, the creator of the podcast “American Hysteria,” has noted: Trolls tend to flash little victorious side glances to the camera. These videos were more like something your dreams might invent, weird and unsettling. Like how the characters would often repeat the same movements over and over, blank-eyed, as if taking part in some garish, otherworldly ceremony. As Weber-Smith said, “What makes this story even more bizarre, even more unnerving, is that no one has yet figured out the people who were making these videos, and why.”

But there was one exception. One man was identified. According to BuzzFeed, this man’s contribution to #Elsagate — as the scandal had become known — was to post videos of his daughters “screaming in fear, bathing, pretending to be babies, spitting up food” and “being force‑fed.”

That man’s name was Greg Chism.

In 2012, well before he established himself as a lawn care influencer, Greg created another YouTube channel called, simply, Greg Chism.

“It was just a way to store home videos,” he said. “Three or four a week. I didn’t even give them a title. It wasn’t anything. It had fewer than 1,000 subscribers.”

Greg showed me one of the videos. In it, he and his two daughters were running down the toy aisle at Walmart, fighting with lightsabers — a somewhat overindulgent, nonauthoritarian single father and his devoted children. It was endearing, but nothing more.

But then he tried something different.

“OK.” Greg hesitated. “My sister bought the kids a Barbie cruise ship for Christmas. So I thought, I’ll film them opening it. They loved it. They were playing in the box. They had the box on their heads, running around the house. It was funny.”

Greg uploaded the video and forgot all about it. Until he logged on a few weeks later and discovered it had been viewed a million times. “It was just dumb luck,” he said.

Eventually Greg accepted that “Unboxing Barbie Cruise Ship” (which eventually achieved 10 million views) was an anomaly, and he returned to lawn care influencing. Which was when he received an email from YouTube headquarters.

“I didn’t believe it was really them at first,” Greg said. “They told me they’d noticed I had a video with 10 million views, they’d started a kind of YouTube school, and would I be interested in learning how to replicate the success.”

YouTube school was online, and Greg attended assiduously. Everything the teacher advised, he put into action. The teacher suggested that he give his channel a better name than Greg Chism, so he came up with Toy Freaks. Next, the teacher suggested that Greg work on search engine optimization. The trick, he said, was for Greg to load his titles with as many of the most searched key words among children as he could — words like “toy,” “slime” and “gumball.” Greg suggested that he call his next video “Toy Slime Gumball Extravaganza.” The teacher said children didn’t know how to spell “extravaganza.”

Greg suggested “Toy Slime Gumball Party” instead.

“Perfect,” the teacher said. [...]

So he came up with food fights. “We went to a 7‑Eleven, got nachos, hot dogs, giant Slurpee sodas. We sat in the truck, I set the camera on the dash and said: ‘All right, Annabelle. You ask Victoria for her drink, she’ll say no, you steal some anyway, she’ll get mad and throw food at you. I’ll say stop, then you dump your Slurpee on my head. And then, boom, food fight in the truck.’” [...]

A week after Greg posted his food-fight-in-the-truck video, he was mowing someone’s lawn when he got an email from YouTube. The video had, in just seven days, been viewed 25 million times.

“But why?” I asked him.

Greg shrugged. “I don’t know.” [...]

Greg’s concept for the video, and the videos that would follow, was “Bad Baby.” Within days, the first video had 50 million views.

It was thrilling and possibly unprecedented, but stressful — because now Greg felt the pressure to maintain the success. But how, when this new world he’d found himself in made no sense? His fans were so fickle. How to keep them interested? How to up the stakes?

And then he had it.

In a subsequent “Bad Baby” video, “Sharky held the wand and this time bopped Victoria on the head. Boom. Now she’s a baby too! Oh, my God. Two Bad Babies. We go to a grocery store. I put them in the shopping cart. I’m throwing in groceries and filming the whole thing. We get to the car. Victoria rolls down the window and throws out a gallon of milk. That was the end of the video.”

Greg paused. “That,” he said, “was our first 100‑million-view video.” [...]

Greg has under his bed a stack of plaques from YouTube celebrating his viewer‑count milestones. One hundred million views here, one hundred million views there. And then there are the plaques from Tubefilter, a publication that covers YouTube, commemorating the months when he was the most-viewed creator on the entire platform. Between January 2016 and June 2017, his videos achieved a total of 13 billion views. I promised him I wouldn’t reveal how much money he made. But YouTube’s partner program was generous — the advertising-revenue split was around 50-50 — so it was a lot (although not so much that Greg quit his lawn care business). They got out of Granite City and moved to an upscale suburban community.

In 2017, they were invited to VidCon, an annual convention for influencers in Anaheim, Calif., where they had a meeting scheduled with a new YouTube adviser. She had told them how excited she was to finally get to know them in person. They checked in to a Disney hotel and played in the pool, passing time until the scheduled meeting. Which was when something odd happened.

“She canceled,” Greg said.

Greg had no idea why.

by Jon Ronson, NY Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Chris Buck

[ed. “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.” – George Carlin (more). In a couple months an American census is scheduled to confirm that theory. See also: Have we destroyed childhood? (New Yorker).]