Antievolutionists Gaming YouTube Rankings
I got email passing along a plea for assistance from a person who makes video responses to antievolution guff and posts them to YouTube. He has several that take on the AiG “Creation Museum” where it sits, literally… he shows a field trip to the Cincinnatian limestone/shale formation from the Ordovician period, the same formation that underlies the “Creation Museum”. There, he shows the various marine fossils found in situ and then puts them together with a poster-sized artist’s rendering of Ordovician marine life. The point? The rocks speak eloquently to the coherence of a marine community, built up and laid down in place, without any catastrophic influence that would have randomized species found, mixing them with others that scientists assign to other times, but antievolutionists insist must have been coeval with those found.
OK, that’s the first video, at least.
What’s the problem? YouTube has a ranking system that interfaces with their search function. For a video to come up near the top on YouTube for a search on “fossils”, say, it isn’t enough just that “fossils” be in the keywords associated with it; it must also garner positive votes on the rating system. People viewing these videos are given the opportunity to vote each video with between 1 and 5 stars. And the antievolutionists have figured out that they can make inconvenient debunkings disappear from the high spots in YouTube search results by all logging in and voting 1-star ratings on those debunkings. The video above, for example, was previously a consistently 5-star rated video that came up in the top five or ten results when one searched for “fossils”. It was down to 3 stars average, and has inched back a little since the antievolutionist gaming was first noticed.
So let me encourage you to watch that video, and others linked below, and give them your own ranking. Don’t give a video a ranking it doesn’t deserve, certainly, but in my viewing of the above, I found it informative and persuasive, so I certainly have no qualms about giving it a positive ranking myself. Don’t let the heckler’s veto deprive others of the ability to find and view good materials.
