How’s this for the type of fear-inducing SEO tuning that (ahem) certain news outlets would kill for? This YouTube video was posted with a question-laden title (“NASA PREPARING FOR SOMETHING? WATCH THIS VIDEO. STS-135 Armored Personnel Carrier Training Video”), featuring a screenshot of a bunch of astronauts driving a tank-looking thing. The video description opens with a conspiracy-laden line, “It may look like a fun ride, but NASA has other plans for the future of our nation and the safety of our people,” and then waltzes right into a stolen Wikipedia entry (with footnote numbers still included!) that tries to hint at improprieties with shuttle mission STS-135.Likely thanks to its absurd collections of tags, the video was then cross-posted to a group discussing Nibiru, the pseudoscience bullshit theory that the 2012 Mayan doomsday will come in the form of the Earth colliding with a massive object (like, say, another random planet that just happens to be floating around), while commenters muse about how this is the sign of the impending military/fascist/socialist takeover of our liberties.I personally like this comment from RobertBienenfeld: “Agenda 21 and the 1st incident in Long Island/NYmetro area coming very soon, probably Biological”. (Agenda 21, of course, is an old UN-sponsored sustainable development plan that’s been dug up and latched on to by a bunch of shouting conservative hand-wringers who are convinced it’s the blueprint for a dominant, freedom-hating world government.)Now the video has more than 618,000 views to match a whole boatload of freaked-out comments. And then, blessedly, sanity appears, in the form of one rather Youtube-ish comment. Turns out, the astronauts aren’t flying around in an armored personnel carrier because they plan on taking over Florida, it’s part of their escape plan. (Which, as we at Motherboard noted months prior to the video above, with another video we didn’t rip from NASA, is really awesome, and involves astronauts ziplining into the APC for a quick escape from fiery doom.)If I spent all my time railing against fake conspiracy theories posted to YouTube, I’d have to cut out eating, sleeping, dreaming about lizard shapeshifters, everything. But this video — with NASA logo still chilling up top — is perfect in its presentation. Look at it on its own, and it’s nothing more than a bunch of smiling astronauts and giggling dorks with cameras. But splash the right mix of wack-job in, and suddenly you’re well on your way to a million views. Even if the fact that sensationalism does well online is nothing new, it does seem a rather fitting message following the space dinosaur debacle. How does one who’s trying to put out good, informational content compete with people firing out bullshit insanity? I have no idea, and apparently NASA doesn’t either: a similar, but honestly titled, video on their actual page has a grand total 4,000 views.Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @drderekmead.
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