# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Bots, artificial intelligence and social media algorithms are shaping the fate of humanity at a startling pace. At what point is control lost and the creations take over? How about now?

Image

Shoes retrieved from the water near a Lion Air jet crash in October. Credit Credit Binsar Bakkara/Associated Press

Try to imagine the last 11 minutes of Lion Air Flight 610 in October. The plane is a new machine, Boeing's sleek and intelligent 737 Max 8, fitted with an advanced electronic brain. After takeoff, this cyberpilot senses that something is wrong with the angle of ascent and starts to force the jetliner down.

A tug of war follows between men and computer, at 450 miles an hour - the human pilots trying to right the downward plunge, the automatic pilot taking it back from them. The bot wins. The jetliner crashes into the Java Sea. All 189 onboard are killed.

And here's the most agonizing part: The killer was supposed to save lives. It was a smart computer designed to protect a gravity-defiance machine from error. It lacks judgment and intuition, precisely because those human traits can sometimes be fatal in guiding an aerodynamic tube through the sky.

We still don't know the exact reason the pilots of that fatal flight couldn't disable the smart system and return to manual control. It looks as if the sensors were off, instigating the downward spiral. A report by the Federal Aviation Administration in 2013 found that 60 percent of accidents over a decade were linked to confusion between pilots and automated systems.

But it's not too much of a reach to see Flight 610 as representative of the hinge in history we've arrived at - with the bots, the artificial intelligence and the social media algorithms now shaping the fate of humanity at a startling pace.

Like the correction system in the 737, these inventions are designed to make life easier and safer - or at least more profitable for the owners. And they do, for the most part. The overall idea is to outsource certain human functions, the drudgery and things prone to faulty judgment, while retaining master control. The question is: At what point is control lost and the creations take over? How about now?

It was exactly 200 years ago that Mary Shelley published a story of a monster who is still very much with us. Her book "Frankenstein" is about the consequences of man playing God. You can see permutations of the monster, a not-unsympathetic patchwork of human parts, in characters like Dolores, the host who rebels in the television series "Westworld."

Shelley's concerns were raised at the peak of the Industrial Revolution, when the Western world was transformed from sleepy agricultural societies into a frenetic age of factories, machines and overcrowded cities. All the helpful inventions also produced mass dislocation, life-killing pollution, child labor and - as per the invention of the cotton gin in the American South - an expansion of human enslavement.

Today we are close to creating a human brain inside a computer - an entirely new species. In his book "Sapiens," Yuval Noah Harari takes us through a mostly upbeat tour of humanity since the cognitive revolution of 70,000 years ago. At the end of the book - our time - he warns about the new being, the cyborg now taking shape in a lab near you.

The C.E.O. of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, hit a similar cautionary note at the company's recent annual shareholder meeting. Big Tech, he said, should be asking "not what computers can do, but what they should do."

It's the "can do" part that should scare you. Facebook, once all puppies, baby pictures and high school reunion updates, is a monster of misinformation. And Facebook's creator is more clueless than Dr. Frankenstein about the dangers of what he has unleashed on the world.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's C.E.O., has glibly assured us that building advanced artificial intelligence systems will root out the hate speech, lies and propaganda passed among the two billion active users of Facebook. But fake news - whether gossip shared by family members or the toxic kind spread by Russians in basements - is the mother's milk of Facebook. The A.I. may only make it easier for mass manipulation. In that sense, Facebook is headed for its own crash into the sea.

Driverless cars will soon be available for ride-sharing in the United States. If they can reduce the carnage on the roads - more than 70 million people killed and four billion injured worldwide since the dawn of the auto age - this will be a good thing. Except that this year a bot-car killed a woman in a crosswalk in Arizona, and others have been slower than humans to react. There shouldn't be any rush - except from the profit drivers at the ride-sharing companies - to hand over the steering wheel to a driver without a heartbeat.

It's not Luddite to see the be-careful-what-you-wish-for lesson from Mary Shelley's era to our own, at the cusp of an age of technological totalitarianism. Nor is it Luddite to ask for more screening, more ethical considerations, more projections of what can go wrong, as we surrender judgment, reason and oversight to our soulless creations.

As haunting as those final moments inside the cockpit of Flight 610 were, it's equally haunting to grasp the full meaning of what happened: The system overrode the humans and killed everyone. Our invention. Our folly.
I invite you to follow me on Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. Twitter (@nytegan).

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Deadly Soul of a New Machine: Bots, Artificial Intelligence and Algorithms. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | The Deadly Soul of a New Machine

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Bots, artificial intelligence and social media algorithms are shaping the fate of humanity at a startling pace. At what point is control lost and the creations take over? How about now? Try to imagine the last 11 minutes of Lion Air Flight 610 in October.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We’re building an artificial intelligence-powered dystopia, one click at a time, says techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci. In an eye-opening talk, she details how the same algorithms companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon use to get you to click on ads are also used to organize your access to political and social information. And the machines aren’t even the real threat. What we need to understand is how the powerful might use AI to control us -- and what we can do in response.

# data[].attributes.headline
"If you see a notification, it schedules you to have thoughts...you didn't intend to have. If you swipe over that notification...you...[spend]..a little bit of time getting sucked into something that maybe you didn't intend to get sucked into."

# data[].attributes.subject
"If you see a notification, it schedules you to have thoughts...you didn't intend to have. If you swipe over that notification...you...[spend]..a little bit of time getting sucked into something that maybe you didn't intend to get sucked into."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Tristan Harris: How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A handful of people working at a handful of tech companies steer the thoughts of billions of people every day, says design thinker Tristan Harris. From Facebook notifications to Snapstreaks to YouTube autoplays, they're all competing for one thing: your attention.

# data[].attributes.headline
How Facebook likes can be used to predict personal attributes / traits.

# data[].attributes.subject
How Facebook likes can be used to predict personal attributes / traits.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It's troubling enough that British teenager Molly Russell sought out images of suicide and self-harm online before she took her own life in 2017. But it was later discovered that these images were also being delivered to her, recommended by her favorite social media platforms. Her Instagram feed was full of them. Even in the months after her death, Pinterest continued to send her automated emails, its algorithms automatically recommending graphic images of self-harm, including a slashed thigh and cartoon of a young girl hanging. Her father has accused Instagram and Pinterest of helping to kill his 14-year-old daughter, by allowing these graphic images on their platforms, and pushing them into Molly's feed.

WIRED OPINION

ABOUT

Dr. Ysabel Gerrard is a Lecturer in Digital Media and Society at the University of Sheffield. She researches social media content moderation and her work has been featured in outlets including BBC World Service, BBC Woman's Hour, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and WIRED.

Tarleton Gillespie is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, and an associate professor at Cornell University. His latest book is Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions that Shape Social Media.

Molly's father's distressing discovery has fuelled the argument that social media companies like Instagram and Pinterest are exacerbating a ' mental health crisis' among young people. Social media may be a factor in the rise of a " Suicide Generation": British teens who are committing suicide at twice the rate they were eight years ago. There have been calls for change in the wake of Molly Russell's death. British Health Secretary Matt Hancock, for example, said social media companies need to " purge this content once and for all" and threatened to prosecute companies that fail to do so. In the face of this intense criticism, Instagram has banned "graphic self-harm images," a step beyond their previous rule only against "glorifying" self-injury and suicide.

But simple bans do not in themselves deal with a more pernicious problem: social media platforms not only host this troubling content, they end up recommending it to the people most vulnerable to it. And recommendation is a different animal than mere availability. A growing academic literature bears this out: whether its self-harm, misinformation, terrorist recruitment, or conspiracy, platforms do more than make this content easily found-in important ways they help amplify it.

Our research has explored how content that promotes eating disorders gets recommended to Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr users. Despite clear rules against any content that promotes self-harm, and despite blocking specific hashtags to make that content harder to find, social media platforms continue to serve this content up algorithmically. Social media users receive recommendations-or, as Pinterest affectionately calls them, "things you might love"-intended to give them a personalized, supposedly more enjoyable experience. Search for home inspiration and soon the platform will populate your feed with pictures of paint samples and recommend amateur interior designers for you to follow. This also means that, the more a user seeks out accounts promoting eating disorders or posting images of self-harm, the more the platform learns about their interests and sends them further down that rabbit hole too.

Recommendations expose you to content you didn't necessarily want to see-and more and more of it.

As Molly's father found, these recommendation systems don't discriminate. Social media shows you what you "might love," whether you like it or not-even if it violates the platform's own community guidelines. If you're someone who seeks out graphic images of self-harm, or even if you just follow users who candidly talk about their depression, these recommendation systems will fill your feeds with suggestions, reshaping how you experience your own mental health. Recommendations expose you to content you didn't necessarily want to see, and more and more of it; they can consume your Instagram Explore page, your Pinterest homepage, your Tumblr dashboard. Social media accounts can quickly become funhouse mirrors, not just reflecting your mental health back to you, but amplifying and distorting it.

Of course, if their prohibitions were perfect, then recommendations would include only the most acceptable content social media has to offer. Clearly this isn't the case. It's not for lack of trying. Content moderation is astoundingly difficult. The lines between the acceptable and the objectionable are always murky; untrained reviewers have just seconds to delineate between content that 'promotes' self-harm and content that might aid in recovery; with thousands of new posts every day, day in and day out, something is sure to slip through. And self-harm is just one manifestation of mental illness. While Instagram might promise a clamp-down on content depicting self-harm, others will remain.

And bans are not only imperfect, they can be harmful in and of themselves. Many users who struggle with self-harm or suicidal inclinations find immense emotional and practical support online. Social media can offer them a supportive community, valuable advice, and a sense of relief and acceptance. And these communities sometimes engage in the circulation of images that might shock others-as a testimony to someone's pain, a badge of honor for having survived, a cry for help. Blanket prohibitions risk squeezing these communities out of existence.

The issue is not just about making graphic content disappear. Platforms need to better recognize when content is right for some and not for others, when finding what you searched for is not the same as being invited to see more, and when what's good for the individual may not be good for the public as a whole.

We don't talk about recommendation systems enough, perhaps because they are now so commonplace, or perhaps because most users still don't really understand how they work. We may mock Facebook for recommending Amazon products we've already bought. We may dislike how Spotify thinks we want more sad songs just because we played James Blunt that one time. But researchers are beginning to open up more serious conversations about how recommendations work. In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble criticizes Google for amplifying racial stereotypes in its search results. Twitter and Tear Gas author Zeynep Tufekci has highlighted YouTube's tendency to amplify conspiracy theories and extremist content, arguing that its recommendation algorithm " promotes, recommends and disseminates videos in a manner that appears to constantly up the stakes." We need more conversations like this, especially about the impact of such recommendations on people going through mental health crises, that acknowledge not just that self-harm images are available, but how difficult it would be to encounter the same content- or worse -over and over again.

In a Telegraph op-ed, Adam Mosseri, who now runs Instagram, admitted the platform is not where it " need[s] to be on the issues of suicide and self-harm." A Pinterest spokesperson told us: "Our existing self-harm policy already does not allow for anything that promotes self-harm. However, we know a policy isn't enough. What we do is more important than what we say. We just made a significant improvement to prevent our algorithms from recommending sensitive content in users' home feeds. We will soon roll out more proactive ways to detect and remove it and provide more compassionate support to people looking for it. We know we can't do this alone, which is why we are working with mental health experts to make our approach more effective."

But real change here is going to be hard: recommendation has become the primary means for social media to keep users on the site and clicking. It's not likely to go away. And these algorithms are optimized to serve the individual wants of individual users; it is much more difficult to optimize them for the collective benefit. Social media companies also need more in-house knowledge about mental health, to better judge how to handle content that is both objectionable and valuable, and to better recognize the impact these platforms may have on users struggling with mental illness. This is a move Instagram has committed to, and it is imperative that they follow through.

We also urgently need to integrate knowledge about social media and their recommendation systems into mental health treatment. We need more recognition from health professionals that people aren't just searching for content: their inquiries are being answered, they're being offered it through their feeds, through their email, and through the many ways social media companies try to please and retain their users.

WIRED Opinion publishes pieces written by outside contributors and represents a wide range of viewpoints. Read more opinions here. Submit an op-ed at opinion@wired.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It's troubling enough that British teenager Molly Russell sought out images of suicide and self-harm online before she took her own life in 2017. But it was later discovered that these images were also being delivered to her, recommended by her favorite social media platforms. Her Instagram feed was full of them.

# data[].attributes.headline
What you like and how that correlates to the traits that you have.

# data[].attributes.subject
What you like and how that correlates to the traits that you have.

# data[].attributes.headline
Report: We Don’t Make Any Money If You Don’t Click The Fucking Link

# data[].attributes.subject
Report: We Don’t Make Any Money If You Don’t Click The Fucking Link

# data[].attributes.body
The Onion lashing out at Facebook after Facebook implemented a major change to their content algorithm which emphasized content from friends and family over publishers.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
CHICAGO-Informing readers that it was one of the sole means for a digital publication to generate revenue, a report released Thursday indicated that The Onion doesn't make any money if you don't click the fucking link. "According to our findings, The Onion doesn't receive a single goddamn cent unless you dipshits out there on social media move your cursor over to the link and visit the goddamn website," the report read in part, explaining that "liking" or commenting on a post contributes jackshit to our bottom line and, indeed, has zero impact on the web traffic analytics that help our publication sell the advertisements that allow it to continue operating. "If you enjoy any of this content, any of it at all, it is highly recommended that you take one measly second out of your life to actually navigate to any of our many, many articles that grace your social media feed for free. Or, hell, you could even look at our homepage once in a while. Because unless you actually visit the website, there eventually won't be one, you ungrateful pricks." At press time, sources added that, in all likelihood, you had merely enjoyed seeing this headline on Facebook or Twitter and probably weren't even reading this fucking article.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Report: We Don't Make Any Money If You Don't Click The Fucking Link

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
CHICAGO-Informing readers that it was one of the sole means for a digital publication to generate revenue, a report released Thursday indicated that The Onion doesn't make any money if you don't click the fucking link.

# data[].attributes.headline
Facebook Engagement Algorithms Encourage Radical Content

# data[].attributes.subject
Facebook Engagement Algorithms Encourage Radical Content

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Interpreter

This mosque in Digana, Sri Lanka, was ransacked and burned last month by a Buddhist mob set off by rumors on Facebook. Credit... Adam Dean for The New York Times

When they talk about incitement to violence on Facebook - a growing problem in developing markets - representatives and critics of the platform alike tend to describe it as a problem created by small factions of extremists.

The extremists, in this view, push out rumors and inflammatory claims to everyday users, who become ideologically infected. So stopping the violence should be as simple as silencing the extremists.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, made that argument recently when asked about his platform's role in violence in Myanmar. "People were trying to spread sensational messages through - in this case, it was Facebook messenger," he said, by way of example, in an April podcast interview with Vox.

"That's the kind of thing where I think it is clear that people were trying to use our tools in order to incite real harm," he said. Facebook's response? "We stop those messages from going through."

But a reconstruction of how Facebook-based misinformation and hate speech contributed to anti-Muslim riots in Sri Lanka last month, along with research on how people use social media, suggests that those who set out to be provocateurs are not the only danger - or even the biggest one.

Everyday users might not intend to participate in online outrage, much less lead it. But the incentive structures and social cues of algorithm-driven social media sites like Facebook can train them over time - perhaps without their awareness - to pump up the anger and fear. Eventually, feeding into one another, users arrive at hate speech on their own. Extremism, in other words, can emerge organically.

We saw this firsthand in the small town of Digana, Sri Lanka, a week after anti-Muslim mobs had torn through.

One of the posts seen as inspiring the attacks was a Facebook video posted by Amith Weerasinghe, who has gained a large online following. Just before the mob arrived, he'd filmed himself walking Digana's shops, warning that too many were owned by Muslims and calling on Sinhalese to take the town back.

But Mr. Weerasinghe's online stardom was newfound and, according to neighbors, a mere persona.

"He's from the area, he went to school here," Jainulabdeen Riyaz, a member of the local Muslim community, said, laughing at the absurdity of this standoffish local boy posing as a crusading outsider. "His father is a carpenter. He's a normal person."

When Mr. Weerasinghe began assuming his angry online persona, Mr. Riyaz said, some Muslims in town approached his father to ask him to intervene. It didn't work.

We met Mr. Riyaz at a gathering for the family of another young man, Abdul Basith, who was killed by the mob. These three men had grown up side by side, only to have one of them, Mr. Weerasinghe, become a social media celebrity who helped pull the online world into the real Digana. When it was over, a man who had known him his entire life was dead.

Though each individual's story has its own unique turns, there are some common points that have to do with how social media can amplify certain elements of human nature.

Facebook's news feed, for instance, runs on an algorithm that promotes whatever content wins the most engagement. Studies find that negative, primal emotions - fear, anger - draw the most engagement. So posts that provoke those emotions rise naturally.

Tribalism - a universal human tendency - also draws heavy engagement. Posts that affirm your group identity by attacking another group tend to perform well.

Finally, social media platforms use color and sound to reward engagement, which humans naturally seek out. Comments and likes are presented like a set of diamonds clicking into place on a slot machine. That delivers a little dopamine boost, training you to repeat whatever behavior wins the most engagement.

Image

The home of Abdul Basith, who died when a mob set fire to his family home in Digana. Credit... Adam Dean for The New York Times

These are hardly the only things driving Mr. Weerasinghe or others like him. But that path to attention, praise and a sense of importance and agency can appeal to anyone - even a carpenter's son railing against his own neighbors.

"It's disturbing. The radicalization is happening at a very young age," said Sanjana Hattotuwa, a researcher at the Colombo-based Center for Policy Alternatives, which tracks online hate speech.

"They're kids; they're schoolchildren," he said of the users on Facebook groups prone to extremism. "The parents don't have a clue that they're participating. The schoolteachers don't have a clue that they're participating. So this is their initiation into communal relations. And it's hate. It's really, really bad."

This dynamic, far from unique to developing countries, bears similarities to the rise of the "alt-right" movement in the United States. Elements of that movement first gained prominence among young people - mostly men - on sites like Facebook and Reddit, which is also driven by an algorithm meant to surface the most engaging content.

The alt-right, for all its origins in old hatreds, took a distinctly modern route out of the margins of society, according to a recent paper by Jessie Daniels, a sociologist at Hunter College. Algorithm-driven platforms, she wrote, "amplify and systematically move white supremacist talking points into the mainstream."

Studies have found that people tend to shut out ideas when they believe society has deemed them extreme. But they become much more open to ideas that they believe are considered mainstream.

Traditionally, someone hearing an extremist idea for the first time might have encountered it through friends or relatives, who might also convey that the idea is outside the mainstream. Ideas are now delivered through news feeds governed by raw, engagement-driven popular will.

This leads to an ideological flattening. To the algorithm, the content of an idea is irrelevant. Whether it's extremist or mainstream doesn't matter; only its ability to draw engagement counts.

In 2014 and 2015, for instance, critical masses of users on Reddit promoted hate against feminists and against people they deemed overweight. Such ideas can naturally proliferate on social media algorithms, by indulging anger against vulnerable targets and us-versus-them tribalism.

Once those ideas had popped to the top of the user-driven algorithm a few times, they quickly became perceived as mainstream and were adopted - and even angrily defended - by much of the site, which is one of the most widely used on the internet. Many users pushed that extremism into the real world, harassing their targets on and offline.

Reddit was able expel those ideas, a study found, only when it went much further than banning a handful of extremists. Instead, it began heavily regulating online discussion - imposing a degree of social control far beyond what other platforms like Facebook and Twitter have done.

Anyone who regularly uses Twitter will recognize the way that it inadvertently trains users - by providing bursts of affirmation when a post goes viral - to win plaudits from fellow travelers by putting down users on the other side of any argument and, if no such argument exists, to start one. It is akin to Facebook's inadvertent promotion of anger and tribalism with a less active algorithm but on a far larger scale.

Online outrage can sometimes be a necessary way to channel popular opposition to, say, the injustices of systemic racism or other forms of discrimination. It's not always bad.

The problem arises when negative, tribal emotions begin to permeate social media, which increasingly dominates users' lives and therefore shapes their perceptions of the world offline. Like in Sri Lanka, that can have real-world consequences, albeit more subtle ones, by deepening the social and political polarization that is one of American democracy's toughest problems at the moment.

And by contributing to the sense that every issue is just a way to keep score in a zero-sum game between political tribes, that dynamic can make serious problems more difficult to solve.

That sort of process is not typically considered to be a form radicalization - or at least the label is not applied as easily as it might be to Sri Lankan Buddhists spinning up anger against Muslims. But the dynamics and platforms bear similarities.

As Mr. Hattotuwa put it when describing how online hate had spread in Sri Lanka: "The cancer has grown such that you're looking at ordinary people."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Everyday Social Media Users Become Real-World Extremists (Published 2018)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Interpreter When they talk about incitement to violence on Facebook - a growing problem in developing markets - representatives and critics of the platform alike tend to describe it as a problem created by small factions of extremists. The extremists, in this view, push out rumors and inflammatory claims to everyday users, who become ideologically infected.

# data[].attributes.headline
Mark Zuckerberg Recalls Coming Up With Idea For Facebook After Seeing Dopamine-Addicted Lab Rat Starve To Death

# data[].attributes.subject
Mark Zuckerberg Recalls Coming Up With Idea For Facebook After Seeing Dopamine-Addicted Lab Rat Starve To Death

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
MENLO PARK, CA-Suggesting that the social network may never have existed had the helpless animal not perished before his eyes, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly recalled Thursday how he came up with the idea for Facebook after seeing a dopamine-addicted lab rat starve to death. "I remember watching that frail, malnourished creature lie on its deathbed, actively avoiding food in favor of a shot of stimulants straight to the brain-it was such an epiphany for me," said Zuckerberg, adding that experiments in which rats refused to eat, drink, or sleep because they would rather expire than stop feeling pleasure inspired him to start Facebook at the age of 18 at Harvard University. "That moment when I saw rodents obsessively pressing a button for dopamine no matter how much researchers tried to wean them off it, I knew we had just hit on something amazing. Looking back, I'm proud to say that drug-addled corpse lying on the bottom of its cage launched the largest social network in the world." At press time, Zuckerberg admitted that although Facebook had changed significantly since its founding, he was determined to get it back to its original goal of helping users achieve pure, unbridled addiction to the platform.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mark Zuckerberg Recalls Coming Up With Idea For Facebook After Seeing Dopamine-Addicted Lab Rat Starve To Death

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
MENLO PARK, CA-Suggesting that the social network may never have existed had the helpless animal not perished before his eyes, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly recalled Thursday how he came up with the idea for Facebook after seeing a dopamine-addicted lab rat starve to death.

# data[].attributes.headline
Is the Algorithmification of the Human Experience a Good Thing?

# data[].attributes.subject
Is the Algorithmification of the Human Experience a Good Thing?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Skeptics will point out that those algorithms are designed by corporations to serve their interests, not yours. Social media companies, for instance, want to keep you on their services as long as possible, which makes them prone to pushing emotionally charged content that might not be super healthy for you or for society.

# data[].attributes.headline
“Johny Johny Yes Papa”: the meme born from YouTube’s hellscape of kids’ videos, explained

# data[].attributes.subject
“Johny Johny Yes Papa”: the meme born from YouTube’s hellscape of kids’ videos, explained

# data[].attributes.body
This meme was optimized to appeal to YouTube's content algorithm.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Have you been eating sugar and telling lies? If you have, you're among friends - or at least among the many people on the internet who've turned a kids' video from YouTube into a bizarre, many-layered meme about a big-headed Boss Baby clone who's learning to lie to his strict parents, possibly by way of some slick dance moves.

The meme is named after the song at its center, "Johny Johny Yes Papa," which is the foundation for an extremely trippy viral video that racked up nearly 300,000 likes when it was casually shared on Twitter last week by a user named @b6ner, who offered the crass but admittedly apt commentary, "i'm losing my fucking mind." The video has since been yanked from YouTube due to a copyright claim - more on that in a moment - but not before the meme it spawned took on a life of its own.

No description of the video can really do it justice; to truly understand the sordid tale of "Johny Johny," you'll have to watch for yourself. As of press time, you can still see it here.

In short, it's a largely nonsensical animated joint about a kid named Johny, set amid a candy-colored backdrop and a pulsing uptempo beat. It's two minutes and 22 seconds of Johny sneaking around to eat plain sugar straight from a jar and getting caught by his mustachioed dad, with plenty of dance breaks.

All this weirdness has yielded a deeply unusual meme that has spread across the internet in several directions, reaching both the mainstream internet and its outer, more subversive edges. The video's fragmented, slightly absurdist lyrics and sugar-based parent-child conflict have inspired a bizarre mythos that expands Johny's family dynamics into a portrait of nuclear family dysfunction, complete with weird psychosexual elements and hints of dark secrets.

There's a lot going on here, so let's break it down one step at a time. All you need to know before we begin is that "Johny Johny Yes Papa" is essentially an amalgamation of many strands of internet culture, knotted together in a kind of Dadaist CGI rinse cycle. And like all memes of its ilk, it's much more than the sum of its parts.

The video that spawned the meme is itself a hodgepodge of elements recycled from the internet, starting with its nursery rhyme lyrics

The "Johny Johny" meme video originated on a YouTube channel called Billion Surprise Toys, which actually hosts a whole series of similar videos in which the gleefully disobedient Johny gets caught stealing food from his parents. Here's one that's similar to the original, now-deleted video, to give you an idea.

But the song in Billion Surprise Toys' video, "Johny Johny Yes Papa," predates the channel by years. It has many iterations, one of the earliest of which, on YouTube anyway, is a 2009 rendition, apparently of Indian origin, with "Johny" spelled "Johnny" and set to the familiar melody of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little, Star."

As noted by that video's creator, the Indian preschool franchise Shemrock, the lyrics are as follows:

Johnny Johnny! Yes, Papa?
Eating sugar? No, Papa.
Telling lies? No, Papa.
Open your mouth
O Ha! Ha! Ha!

So it's a simple nursery rhyme, one that appears to have ties to India and Southeast Asia, and one that seems to be suitable for kids to understand and sing along with. Since that 2009 version was posted to YouTube, the song itself has been the subject of hundreds of videos. Up until recently, the most successful version was posted in 2013 by the India-based kids' YouTube powerhouse ChuChu TV:

The important thing to understand about the companies making these videos is that they are often extremely successful on YouTube. One compilation video of ChuChu TV songs (including "Johny Johny") has more than 1.5 billion views. And because YouTube's algorithm can be easily manipulated to continuously surface incrementally similar content designed to mindlessly entertain small children, there's a huge platform-induced incentive to churn out endless, repetitive videos that essentially regurgitate the same content over and over again, with slight variations.

So we don't just have one single version of the "Johny Johny Yes Papa" song; we have hundreds, with subtle differences in music and video content and structure. There's even a subreddit that, since 2014, has chronicled many of them.

"Johny" isn't the only new nursery rhyme-style song to receive this kind of treatment on YouTube. For instance, the familiar "Five Little Ducks" song that you may remember from your own childhood is one of endless repetitions of counting songs that include "five little monkeys" and "five little frogs." A YouTube search for variants on these videos yields just under 2 million results.

Then there's the notorious (among parents, anyway) "Finger Family," which accounts for about 400,000 YouTube videos.

Each of these songs has essentially spawned its own endless repetitive kids' song subcycle within an endless, algorithm-manipulating YouTube subculture. In the case of "Johny," for example, there are live-action versions, versions for adults, and educational versions. Additionally, the breadth and scope of whatever Johny's lying about changes substantially from song to song and verse to verse, from eating various sweet foods to shirking rituals like dressing before school or getting ready for bed. And some of the individual video variants have racked up literally billions of views - again, for the companies that are in the sole business of producing them.

One such company, based in Dubai, runs Billion Surprise Toys. In creating the "Johny Johny" video behind the meme, it was presumably following the "typical" YouTube kids' video playbook of producing a new, slightly altered version of an existing and already popular video in an effort to manipulate YouTube's algorithm. To do this, it added a few special CGI quirks to make the video stand out from its many fellows. And musically, it took a highly efficient shortcut that's used all the time in these types of videos: It combined the lyrics of "Johny Johny" with the tune from another viral kids' hit.

The music and dancing in Billion Surprise Toys' now-deleted "Johny Johny" video came from other familiar sources with lots of kid-friendly appeal

One of YouTube's most popular kid-centric mega-channels is Pinkfong. Overseen by a Korean education and entertainment company, Pinkfong has racked up more than 5 billion views total - and over 1.5 billion of those views come from a single video: "Baby Shark Dance."

For the obvious reason that the "Baby Shark Dance" video is well-made and adorable, boasts a ridiculously catchy song (doo-doo-doo-da-doo), and mixes animation with live action instead of relying solely on generic CGI, the video has been a global hit among the toddler set - and, by extension, their parents - since it was first posted in 2016. In 2017, it even spawned an Indonesian dance craze that saw families and communities around the country doing versions of the dance:

Like every other song mentioned here, "Baby Shark Dance" has spawned its own offshoots and variants. So it's to be expected that Billion Surprise Toys - which has been on YouTube since 2013 and which, like Pinkfong, boasts more than 5 billion total views - would have noticed the popularity of "Baby Shark Dance."

This is where "Johny Johny Yes Papa" comes in. Rather than simply tweaking and remaking either work, the company took the lyrics of "Johny Johny" (such as they are) and combined them with the musical theme of "Baby Shark Dance" (such as it is). Then it added the wide-eyed, big-headed CGI baby, his disciplinarian father, his disciplinarian father's mustache, and a whole mashup of familiar dance moves.

As you can see from the GIFs of the video in this story, it's a pretty sophisticated effort for a silly clip designed to keep toddlers staring at YouTube. In fact, the method by which this video was almost certainly made also tells us something about why it spread so rapidly and suddenly.

Witness how Mustache Dad is essentially performing a sequence of already famous dance moves, like the horse gallop from Psy's " Gangnam Style" video and Beyoncé's iconic " Single Ladies" strut. The moves were likely recreated from original videos of Psy and Beyoncé using publicly available motion capture files and then imported into 3D graphics software and "skinned" with the character of Johny's dad.

The result is simultaneously a step further removed from its two predecessors and much weirder to (non-toddler) people who've never heard of "Johny Johny" or "Baby Shark Dance."

And the bizarreness of the video - combined with the sudden realization, for many, that Billion Surprise Toys has made several kids' videos about Johny and his family, where Johny is always getting busted for one thing or another in progressively more disturbing scenarios - was what made it such perfect meme fodder.

"Johny Johny" introduced millions of people to Billion Surprise Toys' hellscape of a kid video universe; memes ensued

The kids' videos on YouTube aren't intended to be memes, even though they essentially function like memes by spawning endless iterations of themselves. But they have also spawned real memes, like these clearly ironic takes on the "Johny Johny" nursery rhyme:

(Please note that the obvious irony here doesn't make them any less creepy.)

Since Billion Surprise Toys' "Johny Johny" video has gone mainstream, it's generated a number of fairly mainstream reactions that celebrate its lighter aspects and mashes them together with other memes - you know, typical meme fare.

But it's also generated many wide-eyed, taken-aback analyses of just what is happening in these many videos. This video in particular, in which Johny's dad is suddenly mad at him for simply eating breakfast, has made the rounds as fodder for one thread of the "Johny Johny" meme that warns of him being trapped in an abusive household.

why is he not allowed to eat breakfast, the fear in his eyes omg
- snail god (@han_mae16) August 28, 2018

Upon having studied Johny's home life, I've come to realize it's extremely toxic. Every adult, child, animal and inanimate object in this house is a pathological liar, narc and hypocrite. The only taboo in this house is eating. Not just sugar, eating in general. It's so fucked. pic.twitter.com/J8a1w7aOfw
- Calum (@DearDiarheha) August 28, 2018

It's not as if no one knew that kids' videos can be, er, weird and creepy. Like classic nursery rhymes and fairy tales, which often appear horrifying from an adult perspective, the sorts of random elements that make these types of videos catchy and entertaining to kids can take on surreal and distorted overtones when viewed through an adult lens.

For instance, in many of the other Billion Surprise Toys videos that reveal glimpses of Johny's life, he's shadowed by a giant talking ice cream cone:

Oh, and there's a walking anthropomorphic fridge that at one point seems to be a sibling who calls Johny's mother "Mommy":

And the further you go down the rabbit hole of Billion Surprise Toys' videos, the weirder and edgier they get.

The world's attention was arguably first drawn to the rabbit hole of these kinds of stories after last year's massively viral Medium post " Something is wrong on the internet," in which its author, James Bridle, made a classic "think of the children" argument that YouTube videos for kids are tailored to lead to bizarre, distorted, dark, and violent ends. Bridle emphatically cautioned that kids might start out enjoying cute rhyming songs about sleeping bunnies, but eventually the YouTube algorithm's iterative process leads them down a path to videos of superheroes beating each other up.

Bridle's post was a wake-up call for many people about the nature of YouTube's algorithm and the way it can trend toward extremes. That's a valid concern. But in his hand-wringing, Bridle sidestepped the inherent truth that these kinds of children's stories have always been kinda effed up.

Stuff that might delight a toddler - like a giant talking ice cream cone that sleeps in their bed and hangs out with them at home - often feels disturbing to adults. And with the "Johny" meme, that weird, wordless WTF quality seems to have gained a viral memetic quality, as the internet's good citizens try to reconcile the hypnotic humor of these videos with the hilariously dark implications of Johny's domestic situation.

In search of the meaning behind it all, Johny's family members have been ranked and his dad's hotness debated. And memers have taken the story into their own hands - in some cases with extremely dark results:

In essence, it seems to be the rare meme that appeals to every kind of meme-maker and every kind of audience.

But there's one party that's not happy about any of this - the video's creator.

The YouTube channel that unintentionally gave us the "Johny Johny" meme is now trying to curtail its spread across the web

With the internet's adult meme-makers taking the meme in directions like this one, a new wrinkle has emerged in the form of a massive copyright crackdown by the video's creator, Billion Surprise Toys. The media website Dazed, which received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice over the video, confirmed the claim's origin to Vox. Billion Surprise Toys seems to have gone all out to eradicate the memetic spread of its video, including by issuing a DMCA takedown to the original massively viral tweet that started it all, disabling embedding for many of the videos across its channel, and apparently deleting or obscuring the link to the original video on YouTube. It has also issued takedown notices to just about every image-based follow-up we could find.

Granted, there's justification for the channel to freak out and try to stop the meme before it gets even less kid-appropriate. But all the memes are squarely within the realm of fair use - and, more significantly, it seems highly dubious that Billion Surprise Toys' copyright claim would stand up on its own.

The company could not be reached for comment, but given how generic and memetic all the elements in its video are, it seems as though the company has little legal claim against meme-makers who have ramped up young Johny's popularity - even though some of those memes might be damaging to Billion Surprise Toys' brand as a kid-friendly channel.

To state the obvious, it owns the copyright to neither of the two songs it combined, since "Johny" existed for years before Billion Surprise Toys made a video about him and his sugar consumption, and "Baby Shark Dance" seems to have been created by Pinkfong. So at a glance, it stands to reason that any copyright claim in this case is invalid.

Still, the DMCA notices have definitely slowed the spread of the video, at least for now. And for some onlookers, no doubt overwhelmed by the mix of catchy, creepy, and just plain strange entertainment the videos offer, that's a relief:

To whoever is pulling DMCA takedowns on all the Johnny Johnny videos:
Thank you.
- XOXO! (@PapillonYawn) August 30, 2018

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"Johny Johny Yes Papa": the meme born from YouTube's hellscape of kids' videos, explained

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Have you been eating sugar and telling lies? If you have, you're among friends - or at least among the many people on the internet who've turned a kids' video from YouTube into a bizarre, many-layered meme about a big-headed Boss Baby clone who's learning to lie to his strict parents, possibly by way of some slick dance moves.