Draft:Media Grifting

Media Grifting, often known as Negativity Grifting, or just Grifting, is an internet phenomenon involving online accounts posting constant, sensationalized, often bigoted content about a piece of media or an individual online to drive engagement. This phenomena is most prevalent on social media sites like YouTube, X, or TikTok, where content containing rage bait is pushed more favorably by algorithms and monetized. Unlike traditional grifters, instead of targeting an individual specifically, media grifters cater to a broader audience, typically long-time fans of a piece of media. Due to the phenomenon's similarities to and overlap with Alt-Right content farms, many have concluded that Media Grifting is an extension of the Alt-Right Pipeline.

History

Media grifters began to appear around the height Gamergate in 2014. Later harassment campaigns would be inspired by the controversy such as Comicgate and the controversy over Sweet Baby Inc. During the 2016 US Election, many grifters began both talking about both politics and Nerd culture at the same time with them constantly talking about subject such as SJWs and Wokeness.

In the modern era, grift can be non-political, with topics such as video game graphics being notable complaints from grifters. Games like Pokémon Legends: Z-A have been reviewed bombed because of graphic complaints from grifters.

Media Grifting Tactics

Nostalgia Baiting

The main grifting tactic involves appealing to the viewpoints of long-time fans of a piece of media and encouraging them to adopt the grifter's viewpoints, regardless of what the grifter actually believes. They will also try to appeal to the nostalgia viewers have for a certain piece of media, claiming that modern changes are resulting in a decline in quality of a piece of media.

Sensationalism and Toxicity

Content from grifters often uses sensationalized titles or thumbnails to grab viewer's attention in order to gain viewers, followers, and ad revenue, frequently using inflammatory and sensationalized language in their rhetoric, including slurs and stereotypes, or phrases such as "slop" and "DEI".

Grifters will lie about the failure of a piece of media, often using review aggregator Metacritic as a source combined with coordinated review bombs. This is due to the website both not requiring proof of purchase and the ease of creating multiple accounts due a lack of email verification.

While not directly, grifters will encourage the harassment of people involved in a piece of media, or critics who call out their grift or debunk them. When criticized or called out for grifting, either grifters themselves, or fans of grifters, will claim that the critic is just criticizing them because they disagree with them, or insult the critic's physical appearance, sexuality, or other characteristics.

This toxic behavior can backfire on the grifter, as their extreme and toxic personality can lead to a person consuming the piece of media the grifter is talking about, either to form their own conclusion on it or out of spite for the grifter's toxic rhetoric.

Blurring the Lines Between Criticism and Grifting

When complaints from grifters align with the complaints of genuine fans, it becomes difficult to tell if content critical of a piece of media is done with the intent to criticize, or with the intent to make profit without further research. Content simply critical of a piece of media may get labeled grifting by fans that are critical of grifters, which will validate and fuel future instances of bulverism.

Moderation Evasion

Media grifters that do livestreams often delete or private them to avoid triggering content moderation systems. The engagement and profit they pull in will make certain social media sites like YouTube reluctant to take their content down without third-party intervention, even if their content blatantly violates a sites' terms of service.

Examples of Media Grifting Targets

Prime targets include Disney properties like Star Wars, Marvel and Disney's live action remakes. Other examples of targets for grifting are Dustborn.

Dragon Age: Veilguard has been the target of media grifting because of the fact that the protagonist, Rook, can be transgender if the player chooses to, in addition to one of the side characters being non-binary. This resulted in the game being review bombed on Metacritic, which led to a spokesperson speaking out, saying "We take online trust and safety very seriously across all our sites including Metacritic, Metacritic has a moderation system in place to track violations of our terms of use. Our team reviews each and every report of abuse (including but not limited to racist, sexist, homophobic, insults to other users, etc) and if violations occur, the reviews are removed."

Most new mainline Pokémon games have been the target of media grifting since the announcement of the National Dex cut. What games are targeted depends on the individual, but typically games as far back as Pokémon Black and White or Pokémon X and Y are targets, although sometimes games like Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, Pokémon Sun and Moon and their enhanced versions, and Pokémon Legends: Arceus are exceptions. Complaints vary from poor graphics, difficulty, lack of side content compared to older games, a lack of exploration, or a perceived lack of innovation.

Nintendo recently has become a target of media grifting as a result of business decisions such as the price increase of the Nintendo Switch 2, in addition to the patent infringement lawsuit against Pocketpair. These videos, often uploaded daily, frequently include either AI generated thumbnails of Mario and Pikachu, or thumbnails of Shigeru Miyamoto's face edited in a grotesque manner, even if he was not involved in the creation of the products mentioned. These videos have resulted in the creation of the subreddit "r/nintendogrifting", where users criticize YouTubers grifting off Nintendo's controversies. The subreddit itself has faced criticism for conflating videos providing genuine criticism for videos made by media grifters. However, it has recently made efforts to reduce false accusations of grifting.

Similarly, drama surrounding Roblox, their questionable actions regarding child safety, and internal drama within the fanbase have led to it becoming a target of media grifting as YouTube channels have been made specifically to cover said drama. Thumbnails often include grotesque edits of David Baszucki's face (similarly to Miyamoto's face with Nintendo) paired with phrases such as "It's over" or "They're done" next to it. Such content has recently been getting backlash online, often criticized for being repetitive or inauthentic.

See Also

• Alt-right pipeline
• clickbait
• Comicsgate
• content farm
• Gamergate
• Ragebait