Back in September The Verge released a Gaming PC Build Guide on YouTube and it went viral, but for all the wrong reasons. As much as The Verge tried they simply could not live strong with what they had done. I caught wind of it the day after it posted after seeing memes begin popping up around twitter and Reddit so I decided to check it out myself. The video they made was well produced and started out as a well meaning tutorial, I’m all for anyone helping people get into PC building and gaming after all. But when they broke out the ‘Live Strong’ anti-static wrist band and the zip tie tweezers I knew we had a whole pile of misinformation on here.
Initially I defended the host since I know sometimes in corporate climates people tend to get put in front of things by someone else doings. After all, there were numerous people involved in this project from directors to editors, someone should have caught the inconsistency and misinformation at some point in the chain. But, this wasn’t a community piece to help people, it was a paid advertisement by a credit card company, so production value over content value appeared to be the case. I quit trying to defend anyone when the host went on his own live stream to attack the critics, calling them ‘computer trolls who are mad they don’t have a computer as good as him’.
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Vox Media, parent company of The Verge, has long since deleted the video after a massive amount of backlash and mockery. While it was an entertaining video to say the least I’m glad it was removed so that no newcomer to the custom PC world would have accidentally followed their poor building advice. The problem today stems from the fact that Vox Media appears to be now trying to scrub the internet of the video by going after critical TechTubers and other YouTubers who made fun of them. The first victim is Kyle of Bitwit who used his caricature Lyle to lambaste The Verge’s video.
Welp, @voxdotcom just removed the “Lyle Reacts to the Verge’s PC Build Video” claiming copyright violation and @YouTube, without warning, felt that was deserving of a strike against the channel. Watch out @ScienceStudioYT @TechYESCity @KristoferYee pic.twitter.com/jH5pW7rXDO
— Kyle (@bitwitkyle) February 13, 2019
They have hit him with a copyright strike on his YouTube channel over the video that he did. This wasn’t some random hit caught by an algorithm, it was targeted hit by Vox Media who manually opted to do this. The problem here is that Vox Media, regardless of what Pokimane may think, is not well within their rights as a content creator to do this. The works of Kyle and others are clearly within Fair Use and are Transformative works of the original. I’ve linked below a couple other great videos that are being critical of the original video and seeing how many views they have, I can see why Vox Media is concerned about the image of The Verge. But, someone should introduce them to the Streisand Effect.
