Transcripts:
There's nothing quite as relaxing as a walk through the woods. There's just something about briefly leaving civilization behind to wander through nature that clears your head like nothing else is able to. But as calming as a hike can be, this activity does potentially invite some darker possibilities as well.
When you leave town to walk alone in a remote area, you're not just shedding the stress and aggravations of modern life, you're also forfeiting the safety and security it provides you. For that brief period of time, you're out in the further reaches of woodland. You're just as vulnerable as the animals that scurry away when they see you.
And this makes you a prime target for any predators that may or may not be hiding in the shadows. In late 2013, the following video would appear and subsequently become widely circulated on the internet due to its unsettling nature. The clip is just under a minute long and it was given the title I made a friend on the mountain. Wait for it.
In it, a woman can be seen hiking alone in the distance until the camera turns around to show the man filming wearing a balaclava and smiling maniacally. In the description, the OP states that this is how he likes to spend his time when he's at the peak. And more disturbingly, he writes, "I'll upload the rest of the video later.
" In the first couple weeks of this video's life online, it would amass more than 17,000 views, in turn causing a great amount of concern among its viewers. What if this clip was the precursor to something awful that happened to this woman? Online sleuths would begin investigating. They would quickly figure out that the clip was recorded on Montra Mountain outside Half Moon Bay in California, and local police would start an investigation after being contacted dozens of times by internet users. It wouldn't take law enforcement
long to track down the creator of this video, who goes by Gort Evans. He's a Californiabased mechanic who has a tendency to make quirky videos on the internet. Police would end up spending 40 minutes questioning Gort who had actually filmed some of their discussion to share on social media. >> Yes, I am. I'm going to put this online.
>> How you doing? >> I'm doing fine. What can I do for you today? >> Well, I think you probably have some idea why we're here to talk to you today. >> I'm somewhat, but I'd like you to explain it. >> Okay. Well, somebody contacted the police department. >> Yes. >> They found a video on a website that was >> involving a female hiker top of Montana mountain.
>> Yes. >> Sound familiar? >> Uh, yes. It sounds very familiar. >> Appears to be you shooting the photo. >> It probably appears to be me. Yes, it does. >> Was it you? >> Why would I answer that? What is there a crime? >> Well, that's one of the reasons we're here. >> Really? >> Because your video ends abruptly.
does end abruptly. Did you do any research onto my uh online persona, my Gourd Evans? Did you look at any of my other live leak videos? >> Well, now you're asking me questions. >> Well, yes. It's only fair, isn't it? >> Okay. I'd be more than happy to answer your questions if you want to turn the video camera off.
>> I am not going to turn the camera off. Cuz this is what I do. I love making videos. This is hilarious to me. >> Hi. >> I really don't. >> The police would also manage to track down the woman in the video who is thankfully okay. By coincidence, she had actually come across a recording of social media all on her own, shocked to find herself portrayed in some creepy Voyer clip.
She would write a letter to the local news talking about how hiking was helping her get through her cancer treatment. But ever since seeing herself in that video, she's been avoiding that trail. She also mentions that she does remember passing by the man filming, who appeared to be hiding in a cave. He made her nervous, so she gave him a wide birth and continued her hike as usual.
Gourd hadn't really committed a crime, but the police, the community, and the woman in the clip all asked if he would consider removing the video, which had been causing a lot of fear surrounding public safety on the hiking trails that snake around Half Mumbai. He refused to do so, stating in his talk with the police that everybody should have watched his other videos so they'd know that he was just joking.
Gourd isn't the first person to be stubborn about being creepy on the internet, and in the end, he didn't face any repercussions for his video. But what is weird about this situation is what happened after members of the social media site that Gourd had originally posted his video to would all come to his defense, sending hate mail and even death threats to the journalists that reported on the story and the policemen that were involved in the investigation.
What sort of community would so strongly come to the defense of someone who had made such an objectively creepy video? The answer to that question is that on the platformthat Gourd had uploaded his video to, his clip was in reality one of the most mundane pieces of media there. If we were to treat this site as an iceberg, Gourd will be sitting at the very top with everything below him being progressively more and more disturbing.
This platform was home to some of the most vile content on the public facing internet throughout the 2000s and the 2010s, eventually getting shut down due to its lawless nature. This site was none other than live.com. No matter how old you are or how long you've been a citizen of the internet, chances are pretty good that you've heard of Live Leak in some capacity.
Maybe you've seen some meme about the Live Leak logo appearing in the top left corner of a video, indicating that something really bad is about to happen. Or you've seen the Live Leak name attached for no reason to random shock videos that have found their way onto your screen at some point in your life. No matter what the context may have been, hearing the name Live Leak probably elicits feelings of danger and unease.
But because Live Leak hasn't existed for half a decade now, we almost forget that this wasn't just some branding for horrible shock videos. It was an actual social media platform just like the one you're using to watch this video right now. And it has a history that I've never seen told on YouTube before. The story of Live Leak is inseparably tied to the time period when it was most popular.
Nowadays, Shock content isn't as centralized as it used to be. It just kind of pops up in places where people already congregate on the internet like Reddit or Twitter. But having a place like Live Leak act as a definitive home for shocking and disturbing videos means that this platform story is essentially the story of all esoteric and dark media that was circulating on the internet in the 2000s and the 2010s.
So, if you're at all nostalgic about these time periods, you're likely going to enjoy this video. This is going to be a long one, so sit back, grab a nice snack and a drink, and let me tell you about some insane stuff from the internet's most infamous shock site. Have you ever noticed while on a road trip that all small towns and cities just [music] kind of have the same stuff? No matter which one you're traveling through, you're always going to see the same few franchise businesses copy and pasted from [music] town to town with each one having the same
boutique main street with a small local shops that sell handmade soap and vintage clothing and the outskirts that always have the [music] same stros outlined with blossom pizzas, Canadian Tigers, and gas stations. It almost makes traveling a little boring with every place just kind of being the exact same.
[music] And that's exactly how the internet is nowadays. Your time online is pretty much always spent using the same few websites. Sometimes something novel like W Place comes along and you're suddenly spending time somewhere new, but these are usually flashes in the pan and you quickly forget about them and go back to surfing Reddit or YouTube.
If the modern internet is akin to driving through small towns in modern-day Canada, the internet of the early 2000s was more like traveling through villages in the American Wild West. There were no multi-billion dollar companies giving you predictable and repetitive experiences. [music] People would mostly spend their time surfing small handmade websites that were essentially unpoliced by any kind of authority.
While internet service providers could and sometimes did block access to websites that shared shocking across content, this rarely happened. [music] And the internet users of web 1.0 were pretty much free to share whatever they wanted on their own sites they hosted and maintained themselves. And believe me, they absolutely took advantage of this truly unrestrained free speech.
In the year 2000, a mysterious team supposedly based in the Netherlands would launch a site called [music] ogish.com. The goal of their platform was to host and share shocking video content such as clips of car accidents, war footage, and videos of people getting hurt or killed in various ways. This wasn't a new idea. Shock sites were a dime a dozen in this era of the internet, but there was something special that set apart from the rest.
While Ogrish may have started out like its peers, posting whatever shock content they could just for the sake of it, they eventually would reframe the mission of the site to be more oriented around current events. Instead of just sharing random clips of people dying for no real purpose, Ogrish would instead begin to share these videos with some context and sometimes even a story attached to them.
They wouldn't be reposting the same 15-year-old faces of death shock videos. They would start to focus on posting fresh content that was relevant to the modern day. The creators would write a script that would scan extremist Islamic web pages to alert them if any new mediawas found. They would begin hiring people to hunt down the latest pieces of shock media attached to current events happening around the world.
This rebranding as a sort of alternative news source skyrocketed Ogrish's notoriety, also landing them in a lot of hot water. In 2002, Ogrish would be investigated by the FBI after being the first site on the internet to share the video depicting the execution of American journalist Daniel Pearl at the hands of jihadists.
The ACLU would actually come to Ogish's defense here, and the FBI ultimately halted the investigation without any charges being laid. Ogres hadn't committed any crimes. They legally obtained their footage, often paying to license it. They were merely sharing the horrible things others did, but they weren't facilitating those crimes in any way.
Still, Ogish would only face more scrutiny the bigger it got. In 2005, the site would almost be completely blocked in several European countries due to a tier 1 network ban. Despite this, Ogres would still continue to grow, but just one year later, they would hit a ceiling of sorts. The hardware they're using to run the site had reached this limit and couldn't keep up with the increasing bandwidth demands.
And on top of that, the curators finding content for the site weren't able to find videos fast enough to keep their ever growing user base happy with fresh content. This slow roll out of new stuff to see wasn't much of a problem before, but ever since the advent of a new rival platform called YouTube, it was becoming a growing concern.
On YouTube, you didn't have to wait for the site's administrators to find new stuff. Users could put up their own videos, making for an almost endless selection of clips to watch. YouTube might not have been meant for sharing shock videos, but they did find their way there sometimes. And regardless, they were still stealing attention away from Ogish users, which was becoming more and more of a problem as time went on.
These issues would eventually be the end of Ogish, but the team behind the site would partner with another team in the UK to create a new platform from its ashes. On October 31st, 2006, users who typed ogres.com into their web browsers were redirected to a new site called Live Leak. This platform looked much more clean and corporate than Ogrish, appearing not too different from other normal video hosting sites from the same era.
The mission wasn't different from before. This was still very much a place to see shocking videos of the horrible things happening around the world. But the difference with Live Leak was that users could upload their own shock videos to the site, which would sit alongside the curated content shared by the platform's administrators. When Ogres had transformed into Live League, it was still a pretty niche say on the internet just by nature of being a shock site, which is a sort of place that's destined to be outside the mainstream.
But surprisingly enough, Live League would indeed become a key part of the mainstream mere months after launching. At the very end of 2006, former president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, was executed after being convicted of crimes against humanity. While the Iraq government shared an official video depicting the moments leading up to his execution, but not actually showing the act itself, one of the guards in the room happened to film the hanging on his flip phone.
He would then share it on the internet. It's unclear where this video was originally posted, but in any event, it eventually found its way onto Live Leak, which is how the world at large saw how Saddam Hussein got killed. Live leak would blow up after the Saddam video was shared on it with British Prime Minister Tony Blair directly mentioning the site in his statement on the event with YouTube beginning to enforce their newly established community guidelines at the time.
Live leak instantly cemented itself as a risque counterpart to that platform. If it wasn't allowed on YouTube, chances are it would find its way into Live Leak. When I first went on Live Leak in the late 2000s, it had a reputation for being the dangerous version of YouTube. At least among us kids.
It was the sort of site your friends would show you after turning off all the lights at midnight during a sleepover. It was where I first saw Gore, and it was how I initially learned about the awful things people do when they're fighting a war. Saddam Hussein's execution was a pretty big indicator of what was to come on Live Leak.
The first few years of the site mainly centered around the Iraq War. This was the first time in history combat footage could be instantly seen by the citizens of the country fighting it. Before Live League, raw images and videos of war were hard to come across. News companies often left out the more gruesome details, and with official legacy media being your only information source, you end up a little shielded from the morbid realities of fighting awar.
This wasn't because legacy media wanted to shelter their viewers from more shocking content. It was also a shortcoming of the information networks that facilitated the mainstream news at the time. Live League changed this in a big way. Not only could the people on the ground in the war share their experiences directly with others on Live Leak, but Legacy Media would also use a platform to run more negative stories about the Iraq war using media they found on the site.
Studies show that an average person's support for a war their country is fighting is lessened when they're shown graphic clips of said war. And I don't think it's a coincidence that the decline in support for the Iraq war in particular just so happened to coincide with Live Leak's explosion in popularity.
The Rock War would end in 2011, partially due to declining support for American citizens. But Live leak would continue to thrive over the following decade. Anytime anything graphic happened that the news wouldn't show you, people would flock to Live Leak to see it completely uncut and uncensored. Like I said earlier, the history of Live Leak is the history of all shocking media that was being circulated at the time of his popularity.
Instead of just showing the entire morbid history of the previous decade, we're going to talk about a few key Live Leak sagas. There's no country quite as mysterious to outsiders as North Korea. The two things the DPRK is famous for as a nation is how much control their totalitarian authoritarian government exerts over their people and also their state ideology called Guche which advocates for total self-reliance as a country.
Juche has led to North Korea becoming almost completely isolated from the outside world with the only real historical exception being the humanitarian aid the country would continually receive as a result of constant food shortages. But in the latter half of the 20th century, North Korea would begin experimenting with international tourism.
They would start by creating programs aimed towards South Koreans in the9s and 2000s, but beginning in the late 2000s, they would expand their programs to target English-speaking Westerners. This resulted in a lot of the travel documentaries and YouTube videos you've probably seen about North Korea, like Vice's fantastic Inside North Korea series they made all the way back in 2008.
All of this media more or less follows the same format. Westerners will film their incredibly strict guided tours they're thrust into in the DPRK, and the audience only gets to see the sanitized version of North Korea the state wants them to see. The creators on these tours usually aren't allowed to speak with normal North Korean citizens.
The only people they're allowed to talk to are their tour guides and the various people they're meant to encounter on these tours, who all end up speaking as if they're reading off a script. These videos will always depict some effort on behalf of the creator to try to film the real side of North Korea that everyone wants to see.
But tourists aren't allowed to move freely inside the country. So, all this usually amounts to are the mundane countryside scenes filmed from the windows of a bus all these YouTubers seem to be able to capture. Maybe they'll manage to sneakily stop a passer by without the guys noticing and managed to ask them a couple questions, but this still never amounts to much.
On Live League in 2010, however, you could find a much more real look into the country. This video, seemingly filmed on a flip phone, depicts an interview with a homeless woman in rural North Korea. She appears incredibly thin and emaciated, giving her the appearance of somebody much younger than her real age of 23 years old.
The clip only lasts for 36 seconds, and in that brief span of time, the woman divulges some disturbing details about her life, like the fact that she doesn't have anything to eat and that her parents are both dead. Since Live League hasn't existed for 5 years now, I found this clip on Reddit with only the infamous Live Leak watermark in the top left corner to tell me where it originally came from.
There are several uploads of this video floating around different subreddits with each one mentioning that it was filmed by a North Korean journalist and also that the woman in the video was later found dead in a corn field. This video is a stark contrast to the sanitized North Korean tourism videos filmed by Westerners from the same time period.
It really renders their efforts to capture the quote unquote real North Korea completely invalid. This isn't a brief glimpse of some guy in a field filmed from a bus window. This is the real thing. But how did this clip even come to be? This obviously wasn't recorded by a tourist. This was captured by somebody who had real access to the country.
The cameraman in this video, while their voice is purposely altered to hide their identity, is speaking Korean. And considering the woman isn'tsurprised to see him, we can assume he probably is Korean himself. I wanted to get to the bottom of where this video came from. And while normally on this channel that process can be timeconuming, this case was actually very easy.
Merely googling North Korean homeless woman brought me to the source of this video. This clip was a result of a project called Rim Jing Gang News from inside North Korea. Started in 2007 by a group of Japanese and Korean journalists. Rim Jing Gang is an undercover journalism operation that works with North Korean operatives to smuggle footage taken inside the country.
The journalists travel to the Chinese border and make contact with willing citizens from North Korea who are then given hidden cameras to film their surroundings. The footage then gets smuggled out of the country into China on hidden USB sticks and SD cards where the Japanese and South Korean journalists who receive it do some editing to protect the identity of their sources and to also add some exposition to explain what's happening.
If you're like me and you went through a phase of watching all these North Korean travel vlogs back in the day, you should really check out these Rim Jing Gang videos. They have a playlist now on YouTube with all the English versions of their videos, and they're unquestionably the most interesting footage I've seen come out of North Korea.
It really feels like you're seeing the actual country for the first time. The one thing that really strikes me is that no matter when the footage was filmed, life for these people seems to be more or less the same. If you were to take a video from the '90s and compare it to one taken in the 2010s in basically any other country, you would notice many differences, whether it's the fashion, the home decor, or the technology.
But in North Korea, a video taken in 2011 seems to depict mostly the exact same things seen in a video from 1998. It seems like time just stopped at one point and nothing since then has changed. Filming these videos is a huge risk for these undercover journalists. The DPRK has been known to be extremely heavy-handed when punishing people who try to leak or smuggle anything out of the country.
Like that American college student who stole a propaganda poster from his hotel and was thrown in prison for a year and a half because of it, ultimately dying after being released to the USA in a vegetative state. Messing with the North Korean government while in the country puts you in extreme danger.
And our next lively video shows what can happen to you if you get caught. In this video, which I unfortunately can't show you almost any of due to it graphic nature, we see two interrogations performed by North Korean state police. The first is with a North Korean woman who was supposedly accused of crossing the border and sleeping with a Chinese man.
The officer is quite physical, shoving the woman around. The clip is very hard to watch, especially with the mysterious red stain on the back wall. The second interrogation is with a Chinese man who supposedly ripped a picture of Kim Jong-, the former head of the DPRK. In this one, the victim is blindfolded and hit several times with a stick.
Above him hangs a picture of Kim Jong- and the leader before him, Kimsung. The officer forces him to bow over and over again to these photos, occasionally hitting him when he's not bowing well enough. This video was originally uploaded to Live Leak in late 2012, simply titled leak footage of North Korean interrogation room.
The description only really summarizes the exposition already offered by the video, and there isn't much more information to be gathered on this page. Doing an image back search reveals several articles written about these clips, but again, they only serve to relay the information already contained.
in the video itself, and there's nothing new to learn here. There's several re-uploads on various sites, but they're all taken right from this lively page with the infamous watermark fully intact in each of them. The only information I could find regarding the potential origins of this clip were comments on this fairly popular YouTube re-upload, which garner more than 200,000 views.
Two comments here mentioned that this video was leaked by North Korean state security agents that defected and sold the footage to a broker. These are just unverified YouTube comments, so you should obviously take that with a grain of salt. Through a bit more research involving a certain website based around an infamous man subreddit, I was able to track down two older uploads for the two closest videos, which both date back to 2011.
That's where I'm drawing the line with this one, though, as these earlier versions both come from websites that I'm not even going to attempt to look into. Trust me, there are places on the internet that aren't worth your curiosity. Based on that, I would say that these videos have likely both been floating around the darker and seedierparts of the internet for who knows how long, and they just eventually found their way into Live League, which allowed them to reach a more general audience.
I know I keep saying it, but the contrast between the sanitized version of the North Korea that DPRK wants you to see and the actual North Korea is really something. The supposed good version of North Korea is incredibly strange and goofy at best and downright unsettling at worst. And nothing quite emphasizes that weirdness as much as this next video.
This is a 2013 propaganda video made by the DPRK and uploaded to the internet specifically for outsiders to see. I'm not going to show you the whole thing, but to summarize it, it describes a dream that I guess the creator of this video had. They dreamt about flying into space on a North Korean rocket.
They see such beautiful scenes outside the window like the gorgeous hues of space and that perfect green earth which they take many pictures of. After zooming in a bit, they see an even prettier sight. A fully unified Korean state under the DPRK banner. Of course, this scene was so amazing it made the dreamer cry.
But there was something dark looming on the horizon. At the corner of his eye, he noticed a dark smoke rising in the USA. After looking harder, it would seem that America is burning to the ground. No matter, though, as the USA is the land of authority, which is probably just a mistransation, but kind of funny how it reads in the context of this video.
The clip ends off with a narrator telling the audience that his dream will come true and it will be beautiful. It's certainly something to see North Korea call another country authoritarian and tyrannical, but what's more interesting about this video is that depiction of the USA. It's out of place. Everything else in this video is really simple computer animation, but then you have this detailed destruction of an American city done in a completely different style.
Where did it come from? As several news sites who reported on this state, this official North Korean propaganda video uses a scene from Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3. How the creators of this clip came across that Call of Duty cutscene, I have no idea. It's possible they might have just searched American City being destroyed video on the internet and they just chose the first result they found, but I do like the idea of some DPRK official playing a pirated copy of Modern Warfare 3 and recording with Fraps or something.
Obviously, Activision wasn't all that pleased with their intellectual property appearing in a propaganda video made by an actual enemy nation in the United States. So, they DMCA the YouTube video and it was taken down. Live Leak though didn't have a DMCA system and this video continued to live his life on that platform with the Live Leak version even having English subtitles.
This story really emphasizes the whole mission behind Live Leak to have an alternate place to see relevant but risque media that bigger platforms are too strict to host. This has led to people getting important information they might not have otherwise gotten like the 2011 urination incident in Afghanistan. Yeah, that's really what it's called.
This is a video of US Marines relieving themselves on the lifeless bodies of Taliban fighters. This clip caused an international uproar, one that might never have happened if it wasn't posted to Live Leak. As much as something like Lively can't be a public good, though, it can also be used in the wrong way. This North Korean propaganda video, for example, is this really a significant piece of media, is it important for a platform like Lively to host propaganda made by a totalitarian state that regularly does horrible things to their
own people? You could argue that all media is important and deserves to be able to be seen, but it would be unreasonable to say that there isn't a line somewhere. And on Live League, this next organization we're going to talk about crossed it. By the time the USA withdrew from Iraq in 2011, the country was left in shambles after a decade of war.
As the government attempted to rebuild the country, their policies discriminating against Sunni Muslims led the large civil unrest in the country. A small group began to go around the different Iraqi prisons to free hardline militants who would then be recurred into their organization. This group rapidly expanded and began to take over territory in Iraq much like a mafia, extoring the local population for money and resources.
They began to move into neighboring Syria, capturing even more land in the process. Eventually, they would control a huge territory larger than many of their neighboring countries, gaining an immense amount of power for what had been a small militant group only a couple years prior. They would set their sights even further though.
They didn't just want to take over the Arab world. They wanted to take over huge parts of Africa, Asia, andEurope. And to achieve this, they would start to use the internet as a tool to spread fearsome propaganda, ensuring that everyone in the West knew the name ISIS. It goes without saying that ISIS was and is a terrorist group.
They use fear as a method for gaining power and notoriety. In the past, this was usually done by planning out sensational attacks that would grab the public's attention in a big way, hijacking established communication networks like TV, magazines, and newspapers to advance the group's message. ISIS used to do and still does attacks like this, but in the early 2010s, they found a different and more convenient way to spread fear.
Instead of planning out some attack on a city center in some European country, which required a ton of logistical planning, ISIS instead found that they could achieve a similar effect on the public by making slick, high production value propaganda videos. They didn't need to do any covert operation in a far away country.
They could just film the horrible things they were already doing at home and post them on the internet. These clips would be produced using expensive equipment. And for the first few seconds, they might even look like something taken from a documentary in the Middle East. That is until the people in them start dying. ISIS would start off posting these videos to Twitter and YouTube.
But after being banned from both of those sites, they would swiftly move over to Live Leak, joining North Korea and using the platform to spread violent propaganda. These clips would become a staple on the site. After all, it's pretty rare to see such high production value gore. All of these videos more or less follow the same format.
They show ISIS members talking for a few seconds and then they start killing people. I can't even show you a single uncensored frame from these videos because of how serious YouTube is about keeping these clips off of their site. But needless to say, don't go looking these up. They're truly vile pieces of media.
Live League went from being a site that people could use to expose the evil things they saw other people doing to a site that evil people used to show off the evil things they themselves were doing. And you know what happened? Lively drew a line in the sand. They had had enough. In 2014, they banned all ISIS content from their site and their moderation team would start sifting through the platform's library on a regular basis to flag and remove re-uploads of ISIS propaganda.
This wasn't the first time Live League had enforced a strict content policy. In 2008, they had removed the radical Dutch short movie Fetnina from their platform, but this was an isolated incident which was mostly due to the site's administrators receiving credible death threats. The ISIS ban though was a stark clarification of the site's mission.
Live League was a platform for people to expose the world's evils in morbid realities, not a propaganda amplifier. While I'm sure many of you would agree with this decision, myself included, it would surprisingly foreshadow the site's end 7 years later. Before we get to that though, I feel like while we've gone over a few of the bigger Live League topics, I still haven't given you guys a good idea of the real experience of using Lively back in the day.
It wasn't only Rock War footage and ISIS videos. There are a ton of smaller niches on Live Leak that, while mostly disconnected from each other, are all still key to the site's identity. So, we're going to call this following section the front page of Live Leak. It's going to be a rapid fire round going through a bunch of smaller Live League topics that don't constitute their own section in this video, but are still important and interesting nonetheless.
In 1786, Father Flores of Rome would dig up the mummified corpse of a young woman. She had been a martyr who had died at an unverified point of time in [music] the past for her Catholic beliefs. He would then send this body over to his brother in Mexico who had opened a school for girls in the city of Guadalajara.
It would be passed around various Catholic institutions in Mexico over the next 200 years, eventually making its way to the Guadalajara Cathedral in 1925, where it's been displayed for churchgoers to look at ever since. In summer 2012, a tourist visiting the cathedral would film the body of the martyr using his cell phone. This was not unusual.
There are tons of videos online depicting the corpse on display. But unbeknownst to the person filming this time, they would capture something very strange. Like I said, the person filming this supposedly didn't notice what they had captured until they reviewed the footage when they got home, prompting them to upload it to Live League.
While the original Live League page has been lost with the site's deletion, a 2014 re-upload of the clip has garnered 2.4 4 million views on YouTube. If you guys know me, I'm obviously going to assume this is fake, [music] but I must saythat this is really well done. I honestly can't spot many signs of editing, except for the fact that maybe the blur that fades in right as the corpse begins opening its eyes may be artificial and put there to cover up some sloppy animation, which I suppose could be the case for all the lost focus
that occurs frequently in this video. But what do you guys think? Is this real? It's definitely one of the more believable looking supernatural things that have been caught on camera. This case would be reported on many times throughout the years by mainstream English language news, but there's never been any clarification on the clip's authenticity, and thus it still remains a mystery to this day.
You've likely heard of this one, but in 2016, users on many social media platforms, including Live League, would begin posting videos of clowns wielding knives or supposedly terrorizing various communities in English-speaking countries. These clowns were supposedly attacking people and attempting to lure children for god knows what purposes.
People theorized that there was some dark organized effort behind these clown appearances, but in reality, it was just a bizarre manifestation of a meme, an idea that spreads from person to person through a communication network. In this case, the internet. These clowns weren't actually doing anything sinister.
They were just trying to scare people to attract attention on social media. That didn't mean this craze didn't result in wide reaching consequences. However, in 2016, 12 clown related arrests were made, and even one death had occurred as a result of a stabbing prompted by a creepy clown appearance. This hoax infected public consciousness so much that professional clowns began to lose business due to shifting attitudes towards their characters.
And McDonald's even began shelving their longtime mascot Ronald McDonald for the same reason, and Halloween stores all throughout the Angles sphere would remove clown costumes from their shelves. It's hard to point to a single origin for this trend, but in all likelihood, it started with one person coming up with the idea and gaining notoriety for it, with all the others following suit and chase of the cloud.
The whole trend peaked at Halloween when rumors of some sort of clown purge began going around. But nothing came of this, and the clown sightings more or less fizzled out after that. In Soviet Russia, red light means go. maybe also in postsviet Russia as well. Due to a high rate of insurance fraud in the country, the people of Russia began using dash cams much more frequently than other nations beginning in the late 2000s.
With so many of Russian roads being continually filmed on a regular basis, almost every weird thing that happened was caught on camera and they would make their way into Live Leak. All manners of accidents, road rages, and just outright bizarre things would be caught on camera like this clip which was posted to Live Leak in 2013. TAKING the world.
This video, which was filmed in the Siberian city of Chileins, shows the largest meteor earth has gone in more than a hundred years, flying through the sky and then burning up in the atmosphere. At one point, burning even brighter than the sun. While it might seem like from this clip that not much happened on the ground because of this earthbound foreign object, that wasn't the case.
When the meteor ultimately exploded, it released more energy than a nuclear bomb. While the atmosphere absorbed most of the shock wave, it did reach the ground somewhat, causing widespread destruction, leading to 7,200 damaged buildings and almost 1,500 hospitalizations. With dash cams being so popular in Russia, there were actually several instances of this event being caught on camera from the street.
As dash cams became more ubiquitous outside Russia, there wouldn't be such a heavy focus on Russian dash cam footage in particular. But for many years in the 2010s, a very large chunk of dash cam footage floating around Live Leak and other platforms, specifically came out of Russia. As the world at large became more and more connected via the internet in the late 2000s and the early 2010s, CCTV footage showing accidents in some of the many factories that exist in China would begin circulating online.
While initially these clips are mostly passed around various shock sites, the establishment of Live League in 2006 would offer a place for users to share all the clips they've collected of Chinese factory workers getting hurt in spectacular ways. These videos would mostly be ripped from Chinese social media, and they would depict workers getting caught in machines, often getting crushed, knocked around, or sometimes literally being torn apart.
Factories would eventually start making animated versions of some of these clips to use as training material for new hires. While in the 2010s, Chinese workplace accidents may have been one of the largest niches on Live Leak, the CCPwould begin to enforce stricter content policies on Chinese social media, leading to a vast reduction of new clips finding their way online, which leaves this weird genre of media as a relic from a bygone era.
Just like Live Leak itself, in 2019, the infamous Christ Church shooting occurred in New Zealand. It had been the first massacre of its kind to be livereamed and as such re-uploads of the chilling video would make his way onto just about every platform including Live League. Considering the shooter specifically chose to live stream his horrible act to increase the amount of notoriety he would gain from the crime, nation states around the world began to take action to pressure the social media platforms of the time to remove the
footage. YouTube would have immense trouble trying to keep the video off of their site with 10 re-uploads being made every time one was taken down. They would eventually implement some extremely complicated automated systems to detect the visuals and audio of the footage through all the editing it would be put through by different users and remove them systematically.
But even this didn't fully solve the problem as users would still manage to find ways to bypass [music] the system. If a multi-billion dollar website like YouTube couldn't fully remove the Chrysler footage off of their platform, how do you think the vastly smaller live leak fared? After all, their site was set up with the explicit purpose to share footage like this, which led to a large amount of users constantly re-uploading the video to the platform.
Live leak would focus their efforts on manual moderation, but this didn't prove to be enough. The platform would come under heavy scrutiny with Australia even fully blocking the site in 2020. That same year, Live Leak removed the ability for users to log into the platform and would remove many of the site's features like recommendations, meaning the only thing you could really do on Live Leak now was watch videos that you already had the direct URL to.
This was just the beginning of the end because in 2021, Live Leak would shut down for good with the URL redirecting to another new platform, this one called Item Fix. The administrators would post a letter explaining the transition. They mentioned that they had already achieved all they could with Live Leak and that they wanted to try something new.
Item Fix is a safe for work video hosting site that's built around preparing videos to be shared on other social media platforms. You can take an existing video and add some minor tweaking to it with a sort of crude online video editor. It almost reminds me generator websites from the early 2010s.
While interesting, I do think that item fix doesn't really have a solid place in the modern internet. Nisonens nowadays have multiple convenient ways to manipulate and remix videos they come across on social media. And I can't help but to wonder how long this iteration of this longlasting and constantly transforming social media brand will last.
The death of Live League occurred because of a similar issue. It just didn't really have a place anymore in the modern internet. It may have been a beneficial tool to have 15 or 20 years ago, but nowadays people have much easier ways to access footage of the various evils and tragedies that befall our world.
The recent shooting of Charlie Kirk illustrates this point perfectly. Just about everyone I know has already seen that video, and they didn't need a platform like Live Leak that's solely dedicated to shock material to find it. That's about it for today, guys. I hope you enjoyed the video. Before we go, I do want to tell you guys that this week marks the 5-year anniversary of the last series album of music I put out.
It's called Mirror Blood, and it's the final album I made with my band Wood before we broke up. I always get a lot of comments asking about the music I use in my videos. So, I figured I'd share a bit more of it with you today. If you're into shoe gase, slacker rock, or folk music, you might enjoy it. I'll link it down below. And as always, guys, thank you very much for watching. Have a good night.
[music] with that mess [music] of concrete.
