YouTube Is Disabling Predatory Comments — But Leaving Up The Predators' Accounts

In an effort to crack down on its massive problem of disturbing and exploitative family-friendly video content, YouTube has purged hundreds of thousands of videos in the last week. The company has also instituted a policy of disabling the commenting feature on any video suspected of having predatory comments (that is, those that are sexual in nature, appear to be intended to convince children in videos to act in a sexualized manner, or attempt to get the children to engage with them privately on a separate platform). But the platform's steps to rid the site of exploitative content often fail to stop a crucial party: the predatory commenters themselves.

A BuzzFeed News review of YouTube videos with exploitative and predatory comments directed at children shows that, while the company is quick to flag the videos themselves, in at least 13 instances, the commenters themselves were never suspended for their posts.

Of the 13 videos, 11 were deleted entirely shortly after they were reported to YouTube, and two had comments disabled. But the accounts of users engaging in potentially predatory behavior — including: sexualized compliments, making potentially problematic requests (such as asking children to disrobe or give themselves wedgies), or asking for or providing their numbers or social media accounts to get in contact — did not appear to be deleted.

The videos — which were provided to BuzzFeed News and then reported by a member of YouTube's Trusted Flagger Program — were mostly videos posted by children's accounts. While few, if any, of the videos were likely made for the purpose of exploiting children, all depict young kids in situations that elicited predatory or explicit comments. Many of the videos were of the popular 'challenge' genre (similar to the popular Ice Bucket Challenge), where YouTubers compete in any number of competitions or scenarios for fans. The flagged videos reviewed by BuzzFeed News included children in bathing suits, in the shower or engaging in actions that might be targeted by those with fetishes such as the "hold it in" or "try not to pee" challenges.

BuzzFeed News provided four such examples to YouTube on Thursday morning for guidance as to why the accounts were still active. Shortly after, YouTube told BuzzFeed News the accounts "seem to be old as our teams just looked for some of the accounts/videos and some actions have been taken." However, none of the predatory commenter's accounts had been taken down. Roughly one hour later, the four accounts were taken down. When asked for comment, a YouTube spokesperson provided BuzzFeed News with the following statement:

"Last week we took action to shut comments down on tens of thousands of videos at scale. Our teams are now methodically reviewing the accounts behind the inappropriate and unacceptable comments, terminating these accounts, and reporting illegal predatory behavior to NCMEC. We have shut down hundreds of predatory accounts in the last week and we continue to work to terminate more."

Below are some examples of videos that YouTube deleted or disabled comments on — but didn't disable the predatory commenters' accounts.

Here's a screenshot of a video of some kids swimming. Before it was reported, it had 49 comments.

Before the video was reported, it had a number of predatory comments:

Shortly after reporting the video the comments were disabled by YouTube.

But the accounts that left the comments were active as of 24 hours later.

YouTube deleted a number of these commenters' accounts after BuzzFeed News provided screenshots to the company. This account was left up for more than 36 hours after the video it commented on had comments disabled.

Another video — this one of two young girls practicing gymnastics moves in leotards — was flagged by BuzzFeed News and reported by a member of YouTube's Trusted Flagger program for predatory comments.

Shortly after the video was flagged for review, the video's comments were disabled.

But when BuzzFeed News searched for the user who'd sent the comment, the user's anonymous account was still up.

In another instance, a video from a child's account of the kid participating in a challenge video — in which the children film themselves taking a cold shower — was flagged after the video received multiple inappropriate comments.

Less than 24 hours later, the video was taken down by YouTube. The commenters, however, were seemingly not penalized. Their accounts remained active long after the video was removed.

This pattern continued in videos viewed both before and after flagging.

Like this video of a young shirtless boy attempting to do an ice bath challenge. After it was flagged for a predatory comment by a user with the name "Ypga Fanirl," the video was taken down.

Over 36 hours later, the "Yoga Fanirl" account was still active. According to one flagger, had the account been taken down, the page would would display a red bar with white text saying "This account has been terminated for violating YouTube's Community Guidelines."

Policing predatory commenters appears to be especially challenging for YouTube, which has hundreds of hours of content uploaded every minute. To combat the issue of scale, YouTube has committed to employing and investing in machine learning to help flag and moderate videos when humans cannot. Still, the issue of moderation can be treacherous: Some comments that appear to be predatory toward children may in fact be innocent. In other situations, comments that appear innocuous — such as commenters asking child vloggers to participate in a particular YouTube 'challenge' — may be predators goading the children into creating custom fetish content.

The distinction between predatory and innocent accounts isn't always clear. But the problem persists, despite YouTube's efforts. One volunteer moderator told the BBC — and later BuzzFeed News — that they believe between 50,000 and 100,000 predatory accounts remain across the platform. While YouTube's disabling of comments is a swift correction, without disabling the predatory accounts themselves, it appears to be only a cosmetic one.

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Report: Apple to Make iPhone Power Management Chips Itself

The iPhone always features in best phone lists and the business is very profitable for Apple, but the company isn't sitting still and wants to increase those profits.

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Snapchat's Redesign Won't Save It

Drew Angerer / Getty Images

Snap Inc. introduced a shiny, new Snapchat design Wednesday. The redesign places posts from friends and media company content into two separate tabs, and could make Snapchat a bit easier to use. But that's about it. Because rather than alter the struggling app’s fundamentals, the redesign simply reorders its features, leaving the company essentially in the same place it was before: down in the stock market, losing key influencers to Facebook, and struggling to convince advertisers to spend with it.

In the “new” Snapchat, your friends still send Snaps and post Stories. And media companies still post Stories and create Discover content. But there’s no new breakthrough feature, nor does there appear to be a major new revenue generator to entice skeptical advertisers. “Changes nothing,” one advertising executive told BuzzFeed News after reviewing the app’s new look. “It actually gave me a headache.”

Snapchat redesigned its app because its business is flailing. The company badly missed its revenue targets last quarter after a series of disappointing earnings reports, and added millions fewer users than expected. When turning in these subpar results, Snap Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel told investors his company would make Snapchat simpler to use, pulling a move directly from the struggling social platform handbook: when the car breaks down, give it a fresh coat of paint.

Snapchat’s investors could use some hope, and Spiegel stretched to give it them in a bylined article in Axios where he bizarrely positioned his app’s new design as a major change with the potential to heal society. The post read as an attempt to position Snapchat as the anti-Facebook and Twitter, which took beatings from Congress earlier this month for their role in Russia’s campaign to sow discord in US politics.

“The personalized newsfeed revolutionized the way people share and consume content. But let's be honest: this came at a huge cost to facts, our minds and the entire media industry,” Spiegel wrote, taking an opportunistic poke at his competitors. “With the upcoming redesign of Snapchat, we are separating the social from the media, and taking an important step forward towards strengthening our relationships with our friends and our relationships with the media.”

"Thanks for letting me know there was a Snapchat redesign."

That's a fine sentiment, but the product fundamentals that isolated Snapchat from the problems plaguing its competitors, from fake and sensationalized news to foreign meddling, remain unchanged. Snapchat’s new design has no public share button — the app never had one. And the absence of the share button limits the reach of posts shared by friends, meaning fake, sensationalized, or system-gaming posts can’t spread like they do on other platforms. That may be a virtuous element of Snapchat’s product, but it’s certainly not due to this redesign.

Snapchat's fresh new look won't change society, and it doesn't seem likely to change the perspectives of its advertising customers either. In one Facebook group of advertising professionals, the news of the Snapchat’s redesign was greeted largely with indifference. “Thanks for letting me know there was a Snapchat redesign,” one member said, indicating the app isn’t commanding the same attention from ad agencies as it did when it was a hot startup shooting toward IPO.

So, Snapchat has a new design, but it’s still awash in problems:

• Its stock is trading approximately 20% below its IPO price

• It’s got hundreds of thousands of unsold Spectacles wasting away in a warehouse

• Its user growth is slowing

• Advertisers losing interest in its platform

• Facebook has successfully cloned its marqueen “Stories” feature in wildly popular apps like Instagram and Whatsapp

With each stumble, Snapchat is looking more and more like Twitter, another hot social platform that sold its IPO hard, took off, and then fell painfully back to earth. Here’s what Evan Spiegel said about Snapchat’s need to rework itself earlier this month: “One thing that we have heard over the years is that Snapchat is difficult to understand or hard to use, and our team has been working on responding to this feedback.” Now here’s Twitter’s Jack Dorsey in 2015 in his first earnings call as interim CEO amid ongoing financial turmoil* at the company: "We continue to show a questioning of our fundamentals in order to make the product easier and more accessible to more people."

Four years after going public Twitter is still trading below its IPO price. Snapchat is hoping to avoid a similar fate, but this new design seems unlikely to solve its problems.

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Conservative Megadonor Robert Mercer Funded Project Veritas

The Mercers, secretive billionaires who are among President Trump's most powerful donors, also helped to fund Project Veritas, the controversial activist organization, tax filings obtained by BuzzFeed News show.

Gravitas Maximus LLC — a Mercer investment vehicle through which he also funded the conservative outlet Breitbart — gave $25,000 to Project Veritas, according to a nonpublic portion of a 2012 tax form. The family's involvement has not previously been made public.

The Mercer family did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The filings draw yet another connection in the web of conservative enterprises funded by Robert Mercer, who recently stepped down from his role as co-CEO of hedge fund Renaissance Technologies after a BuzzFeed News exposé revealed the connections among the Mercers, Breitbart, and white nationalists and neo-Nazis.

Project Veritas has come under intense scrutiny this week after one of its operatives, pretending to have been victimized by Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, tried to dupe the Washington Post. The scheme was uncovered by the Post on Monday. On Wednesday, BuzzFeed News published the names of two dozen donors to Project Veritas. A spokesperson for the organization responded that inquiries about donors were causing a spike in donations.

James O’Keefe, the organization's founder, came to national prominence for videos he made of employees of ACORN, a liberal organizing group, purportedly discussing illegal activities. He was later sued over the videos and paid out a six-figure settlement.

The tax filing listing several donations to Project Veritas was first surfaced by Nation Institute fellow Eli Clifton.

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Christ's tomb dated, confirms historical accounts of discovery

Researchers confirm a marble slab where Jesus' body was supposedly placed after his death is from the same period as historical accounts of the discovery of the place where Christians believe he was entombed.

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This Startup Has Invented Egg-Free Scrambled Eggs That Taste Like Eggs

Stephanie M. Lee / BuzzFeed News

After a tumultuous year of reported financial losses and executive departures, the food startup Hampton Creek is trying to get back on track by unveiling egg-less scrambled eggs — a product years in the works — along with a new infusion of investment money.

The San Francisco-based company, best known for its vegan condiments and cookie dough, revealed Just Scramble on Thursday. It’s a yellow liquid that fluffs like an egg in a frying pan, but is largely made from mung bean. While it’s not the first vegan scrambled egg out there, Hampton Creek says it’s the best.

Hampton Creek plans to roll out Just Scramble in restaurants, starting with a handful this year in San Francisco, and eventually to food-service distributors and grocery stores. The company is betting that customers will like the sustainability factor: It’s free of antibiotics and cholesterol, doesn’t risk contamination from things like salmonella and avian flu, requires less water, and emits fewer carbon emissions than normal eggs.

But it also looks, tastes, and scrambles like a regular old egg — and so, at least in theory, customers won’t have to sacrifice flavor and texture for the good of the environment. One challenge, though, will be whether they’ll will be willing to pay for its relatively steep price. Conventional eggs cost an average of $1.05 by the dozen. In contrast, Just Scramble’s price is on par with a dozen free-range eggs, between $4 and $6, according to Tetrick.

“It’s not a product just for conscious consumers,” CEO Josh Tetrick told reporters at a breakfast preview on Thursday. “It’s not a product just for people who care about the environment or animal welfare. It’s something for everyone.”

Stephanie M. Lee / BuzzFeed News

There aren’t many options for people, vegan or otherwise, who crave non-egg eggs. In a review of powdered vegan eggs made by the company Follow Your Heart, a Bon Appetit editor did not approve. “With the watery texture and lack of taste, it reminds me of a wet newspaper blowing in the wind, running across any puddle in its way, hoping to find its home in a larger mound of uncollected trash,” he wrote.

Just Scramble tastes much better than that. Poured into a skillet, the liquid sizzled and congealed into bite-sized clumps as a chef stirred it around. The whole process took about 30 seconds. It tasted pretty much like one would expect — fluffy yet dense, light and chewy — although the clumps were perhaps a bit clumpier than a regular scramble.

"It’s not a product just for people who care about the environment or animal welfare."

Hampton Creek has been developing Just Scramble for more than four years, and it’s gone through thousands of iterations. The staff experimented with at least 200 types of beans before settling on mung bean, a small, green legume mostly cultivated in South and Southeast Asia, said Udi Lazimy, who oversees global plant sourcing for Hampton Creek. The final mix is a combination of mung bean protein, water, salt, oil, acid, onion, and garlic.

The public will first get to try Just Scramble at Flore in San Francisco, which is serving it up – along with spinach, mushrooms, and cheese — for brunch, as of Thursday. According to Tetrick, it’ll be on the menu at other to-be-named restaurants in the city by the end of the year, followed by others in New York, Los Angeles, and Birmingham, Alabama (where Tetrick is from) in 2018. Just Scramble is also expected to be in retail stores by the end of next year, as well as available in major cities in China, one of the world’s biggest egg consumers.

“Wherever an egg is cracked or wherever an egg is scrambled, we want to be there,” Tetrick told BuzzFeed News. He said that he expects the cost of production to go down with time.

The company has the assistance of new investment from Radicle Impact, an early investor, and Blue Horizon. Tetrick declined to disclose the amount.

Hampton Creek has been busy this year. In May, it revamped its food labels. In July, it announced that it was growing lab-made meat out of meat cells — and that it would put it on the market by the end of next year, an aggressive goal considering the slew of other startups developing similar products. Memphis Meats, for example, has said it plans to start selling its product by 2021.

But Hampton Creek, which has raised some $220 million at a $1.1 billion valuation since being founded in 2011, has also been reportedly struggling internally. All its board members except Tetrick quit in July, according to Bloomberg. (It later replaced those members.) Tetrick told BuzzFeed News the fundamental disagreement was over whether to sell Hampton Creek or keep it independent.

In July, Bloomberg reported that Hampton Creek was losing $4 million a month and, without new funding, was projected to run out of money within six months. The company disputes that report. Tetrick says that a number of its products are profitable, although the company as a whole is not.

Those haven’t been the only issues. Bloomberg reported last year that Hampton Creek had enlisted people to buy back mass quantities of Just Mayo, its eggless mayonnaise, to artificially inflate demand. But the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice dropped their inquiries into the matter this spring.

In August, Target stopped selling Hampton Creek products, citing allegations it had received about safety concerns. (Around the same time, as BuzzFeed News reported, somebody sent an unsigned letter to another major retailer, claiming that Hampton Creek had contaminated and mislabeled products.) Even though the Food and Drug Administration said that it didn’t have any safety concerns, Target stuck by its decision. Hampton Creek still remains on the shelves of other retailers like Kroger and Publix.

In other words, there’s been a fair amount of drama — but Tetrick doesn’t think his customers care. “As long as we’re focused on doing the right thing, we’ll deal with it and continue to grow,” he said.

LINK: A Mysterious Anonymous Letter Was Allegedly Behind Target’s Decision To Stop Selling Hampton Creek

LINK: Hampton Creek Has Ditched Its Name, And Is Now "Just."

LINK: Egg Makers Are Freaked Out By The Cage-Free Future

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Cool tech converts dirt bikes for Jason Bourne-like snow supremacy

Timbersled tech transforms motorcycles into special operations snow bikes for winter warfare and mountain combat – and it is now available to civilians to tear it up on the slopes too.

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Former Google exec takes leave from startup after report of inappropriate relationship at tech giant

Andy Rubin, a former Google executive and the creator of the Android operating system, is taking a leave of absence from his new start-up after reports surfaced about an "improper relationship" while he was still at the tech giant.

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China seeks ultimate weapon of warfare

A research arm of the U.S. intelligence community just wrapped up a competition to see who could develop the best facial recognition technology. The challenge: identify as many passengers as possible walking on an aircraft boarding ramp.

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I Tried Emailing Like Your Boss And It Made My Life Way Better

Like any good member of the proletariat who wants nothing more than to serve Capitalism, I am always looking for ways to be more productive at work. And one area where I have more than a lot of room for improvement is keeping up on email.

Look, I could be worse. I’m fairly organized – I use the tabbed Gmail inbox with a healthy number of colored labels and filters. At one point, I even maintained inbox zero, but those days are long gone. My problem is I still let emails slip through the cracks unanswered, occasionally causing problems. I recently searched my sent emails for the term “sorry” and found more than I wish to admit in which I said some version of “sorry for the late reply…”

What trips me up most is my habit of scanning my inbox, often on my phone, opening an email, reading it, and thinking “I’ll reply to that later when I’m at my computer and/or not in the middle of this other project can give a full reply.” Then I leave it marked as “read” and forget about it. I check my inbox constantly, but I only actually deal with my emails in a deliberate way during a few dedicated chunks of my day .

My email situation isn’t the worst. I’ve seen people with HORRIFYING numbers of unread emails racked up, and I typically only hover around 1,000, but it causes me stress and it’s not helping me do my best work. I would like to live my best life. I would like to live a life where I’m “good” at email and also shower every day and floss and stop biting my cuticles and be kinder to dogs. However, I know that I only have any hope of accomplishing the first item on that list.

My actual exposure to people who are extremely quick with email replies is somewhat limited. But my main inspo came from two unseemly places: the Sony email hacks and the DNC leak that revealed Hillary Clinton’s emails. In the Sony hack, I was fascinated by executives like Amy Pascal’s quick, terse messages. How did people communicate like this! I was agog.

Seeing Clinton’s emails was a whole new can of worms: Quick emails to her staff, as well as longer formal emails to other people. She both had a mastery of email and also a complete bumbling lack of understanding of it. It was a hypnotic train wreck, and I wanted in. I want to be the kind of person who just replies with a single word, or forwards an email to my assistant to have them take care of it – how amazing would THAT be?

Look, I know: having the takeaway about Hillary Clinton from the DNC email hack being “I’d like to emulate her email style” is supremely fucked up, but that’s where my priorities lie. I’m like a dumb dog who only cares about what’s in front of my face, and that isn’t who’s president. It’s what the red number on my mail app is.

Let’s call this “boss email”. It’s defined by nearly immediate — but short and terse — replies. The classic two-word email. For underlings, it can be inscrutable. Is that an angry “thanks” or a grateful “thanks”? Does “please update me” imply impatience with you? Boss email can be the workplace equivalent of getting a “k” text reply from a Tinder date.

One of the features of this is that it would feel wholly inappropriate for an underling to reply to his boss using the same fast terseness. So is the boss email also a power move, a way of asserting dominance? I doubt many bosses sit staring at their employees’ emails trying to figure out what “ok” really meant.

Ben Smith, the boss here at BuzzFeed News, has a very specific boss email style that we here have gotten used to. He’s a practitioner of the classic put-the-whole-email-in-the-subject-line. This is often just a few words, with maybe just a word or two in the body of the email.

This was in reference an article about the Unicode Consortium's fight over the poop emoji.

I emailed Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and star of TV’s Shark Tank, because is known to respond right away to anyone who emails him, and because now I can give this story the headline “Mark Cuban’s Advice About Email” for LinkedIn. I wanted to know, did you always email this way, or did you only start once you became the boss? His answer (over email): “Yes.” I’m going to assume the yes was to the first part of the question and he skimmed over part two.

Mark Cuban, probably thinking about his emails.

Ethan Miller / Getty Images

He also says he doesn’t worry about coming off as rude. Of all the things I envy Mark Cuban for – his millions, getting to hang with sports players – not worrying about being rude over email is probably the thing I envy most. Imagine being so free from social anxiety! Good lord.

The Experiment:

On a Monday morning, I began my experiment. I opened my email, deleted a few purely mailing list items, and got to work. For all the PR pitches I wasn’t interested in, I fired off a quick, “Thanks, but this is a pass for me.” It felt empowering.

My new useful quick reply:

The week before the experiment, I sent 21 emails total.

The week I started the experiment, I send 84. (To be fair, about 25 of those were replies to people who emailed me specifically after I tweeted out that I was doing this experiment, and I got a bunch of jokey emails — which I dutifully replied to.)

The other key part of boss style email is doing a lot of email on the phone. This meant goodbye my old crutch of “I’ll reply when I get to a computer.” I would fire off emails from my phone on the subway, walking around at lunch, on the toilet at the office. For the first time I actually started using the suggested Gmail replies, which are actually pretty useful in the sense of purely transmitting information.

That first Monday, as I fired off a bunch of not-super-important emails, something strange happened. I felt… extremely good. I was high on the fumes of efficiency. No longer did a little cloud hang over me, the nagging feeling you get when you know you’re supposed to do something and can’t remember what.

The suggested Gmail app replies were kind of helpful.

The high didn’t wear off after that first day. It lasted all week. I applied the method to my personal email as well, and although I don’t get as many personal emails, I found it worked even better there. Personal emails are more likely to be the kind that need a longer response and you feel even worse guilt for delaying a response to. An email from a college friend’s cousin about career advice? I replied immediately and didn’t have to worry about it. Done! Onto the next thing!

For that whole week, I felt extremely productive at work. And I was! I ended up publishing more articles that week than usual. There was an unexpected extra effect – I felt less like I needed to check my email in the evening after work. Previously, at night I’d often catch up on email, especially personal emails that I had put off during the work day. No more! At nights I was able to relax and watch Stranger Things without being glued to my phone. I even started going to the gym more regularly! I am literally not joking when I say that I think it made me a better person!

Although I was delighted that my work-life balance had been improved, this does not fit well with my “email like a CEO” plan. The boss does not turn off her phone at 8pm! No! One of the key factors of boss email is 24 hour vigilance. Well, thankfully I just don’t get THAT much important email late at night. No matter how I email, I’m still not actually, ya know, a CEO.

But for the next two weeks, the high didn’t go away. I made sure I had taken care of all important recently emails, then hit “mark all as read” and inbox zero’d myself – a status I lost the ability to keep a few years ago. Felt great.

Here’s what I learned: of all the types of technology that make us feel bad, there’s been a lot of focus on social media – Twitter blasting you with bad news, Facebook or Instagram giving you a warped sense of envy. Email has always sucked, but has gotten a free pass in our recent examinations of our digital anxiety. Email is a given, it’s old, it’s a thing you need, not a thing you choose. Complaining about email is like a Jay Leno bit from 2002. Perhaps that’s why you fall into a rut with it; you’re not thinking about it too much.

From now on, I am my own CEO and I am the boss of my inbox. I am going to keep this up.

My friends, allow me to recommend you give it a try. It has made me unspeakably happy to not stress as about emails anymore by being slightly impolite and quick in my replies. I encourage you all to try it. And if not, feel free to email me (katie@buzzfeed.com) “thanks, that’s a pass for me.”

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Shipping giant hit by cyberattack, refuses to pay hackers' ransom

U.K. shipping giant Clarkson has fallen victim to a cyberattack, but has vowed not to pay a ransom to the hackers.

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Shipping giant hit by cyberattack, refuses to pay ransom

U.K. shipping giant Clarkson has fallen victim to a cyberattack, but has vowed not to pay a ransom to the hackers.

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Knocking Trump off Twitter was a 'mistake,' ex-employee says

A former Twitter employee who stunned the world earlier this month by deactivating President Donald Trump’s account for 11 minutes has now stepped forward.

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iPhone X, Bitcoin, WannaCry and more: Biggest tech stories of 2017

As in previous years, 2017 was a huge year across the technology landscape. New products were announced, backlash against the tech sector became more pronounced than it has been in years and concerns about how technology is being used for nefarious reasons popped up seemingly daily.

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Trump's Race-Baiting Tweets Are Candy For His Base

Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP

President Donald Trump has pushed his Twitter account to somehow new extremes this week. On Tuesday, he inflamed Democratic congressional leaders, leading them to pull out of a meeting planned to talk over how to avoid a government shutdown. And on Wednesday morning, he smashed the retweet button on anti-Muslim videos shared by an ultranationalist British party leader, which led to condemnation from British Prime Minister Theresa May. He capped his morning by vaguely suggesting that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough was involved in a murder.

But anyone looking for Trump's supporters to declare that maybe he has finally crossed a line would be disappointed: the president's loyalists basically love it.

"Sometimes he tweets stuff that's on the mark, and sometimes it makes us uncomfortable," said former campaign official Bryan Lanza, "But he's right, we should be afraid of radical Islam, we are targets."

"Today we’re talking about radical Islamic terrorism again and the travel ban," said a former top campaign aide, waving away the controversy over the source of the anti-Muslim videos. "In the real world, no one gives a shit."

The videos, titled "Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death," "Muslim destroys a statue of Virgin Mary," and "Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches," were shocking coming from the president of the United States, and drew immediate anger from British officials who have condemned their source, the nationalist Britain First party.

“It is wrong for the president to have done this,” May's spokesman said Wednesday morning. “Britain First seeks to divide communities through their use of hateful narratives which peddle lies and stoke tensions. They cause anxiety to law-abiding people.”

Republican Sens. Jeff Flake and Lindsey Graham were both critical of Trump's retweets, with Graham saying that he was “legitimizing religious bigotry” that would hurt relations with Muslim allies.

The White House has largely brushed aside concern about the tweets, despite the tweet claiming to show a migrant assaulting a "Dutch boy on crutches" being a false video that has long circulated in anti-Muslim corners of the Internet.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tossed aside questions about the videos' veracity, saying Wednesday morning that "Whether it's a real video, the threat is real. His goal is to promote strong border security and strong national security." Deputy press secretary Raj Shah made a similar point when pressed by reporters on Air Force One on the way to Missouri. "We think that it's never the wrong time to talk about security and public safety for the American people. Those are the issues he was raising with the tweets this morning."

Across the pro-Trump corners of the internet, the tweets were celebrated as evidence of the president's media savvy. On 4chan's /pol/ message board — which frequently espouses anti-Muslim and racist ideologies — anonymous commenters praised Trump's ability to drive press coverage with his Twitter feed.

"Trump's a genius. He's put the media in a no win situation," one anti-Muslim commenter wrote of Trump's choice of retweets. "Either they ignore his shitposts and lose out on viewers, or they look at his shitposts and show their viewers muzzies being muzzies."

A number of Trump supporters feel that just by amplifying Britain First's message, Trump has forced the media to display views that align with their beliefs. "I like how all these fake news headlines are outraged at the're tweeting of far right groups tweets' instead of the actual content shown in the tweet," CuckooCuckoon, a commenter on the pro-Trump subreddit The_Donald, said.

On Twitter, Breitbart writer John Nolte used Trump's morning tweets to level critiques against mainstream reporters, who he argues are so consumed by Trump's tweets that they always "take the bait."

"Trump's most impressive skill is being able to pull the elite media into pissing matches where they always reveal themselves to be liars, hypocrites, small, and self-righteous," he wrote. "Instead of just doing their jobs, time and again they take the bait. Remarkable to watch."

Breitbart

A separate source close to the administration said that while they were confused as to why the president chose this moment to retweet anti-Muslim tweets, they said one of the first things that drew them to Trump during the campaign was his willingness to share his strong views on terrorism.

"The thing I found most refreshing about him was he was willing to talk truthfully about the Islamist movement," the source said. "He was the first politician I knew of who ever spoke extremely honestly about it."

Calling Trump's Twitter account the president’s "most powerful political offensive weapon in the world right now," Lanza said he wasn't worried that impulsive Trump tweets could endanger policy or negotiations, as they already did this week with Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Nancy Pelosi.

"When he tweets, it's with a purpose," Lanza said. "He showed Chuck and Nancy canceling a meeting over a tweet shows how unserious they are over negotiations."

The former top campaign aide paused before declining to directly answer if there was some line or some area that Trump couldn't cross over on Twitter. The aide instead focused on Trump's 2016 victory.

"He found a way to turn blue states red," the source said. "He’s got his finger on the pulse of American voters."

Even though Trump has regularly used his Twitter account since becoming president to lambast political targets or make accusations of impropriety against people like Hillary Clinton, the tenor of his tweets this week have caught even jaded critics off-guard. Symone Sanders, a strategist for Democratic Priorities USA who also serves as a CNN contributor, said that despite criticizing Trump every day, the last 48 hours had shown her that the president doesn't have a basic level of respect for his office.

"Retweeting those Islamophobic videos, that baseline is not there," she said. "A lot of things he's done made me question if the baseline was there, but now I'm convinced it's not there. Trump has no filter and no boundaries that he will not cross, and that makes him a dangerous man."

But Trump's supporters have been content to marvel at the man they see as the Troll-In-Chief.

Breitbart chose to play Wedneday's retweets straight on its website, running a summary of the news with no editorial commentary on the tweets. Breitbart's commenters, however, were delighted by the president's feed.

"YUP..President Trump - King of the Trolls," the top comment on the article read.

LINK: That False Video Trump RTd First Traveled Through Anti-Muslim And Pro-Trump Fever Swamps Online

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Here's Where That False Anti-Muslim Video Trump Retweeted Came From

On Monday, President Trump retweeted three anti-Muslim videos posted by the deputy leader of a far-right British political party.

Twitter / Via Twitter: @JaydaBF

One of the videos, claiming to show a "Muslim migrant" assaulting a "Dutch boy on crutches," is false. But it lived for months on pro-Trump Twitter accounts and in anti-Muslim fever swamps online. Here's the history of the video's journey to the president's Twitter account.

The video first appeared on a Dutch video site, Dumpert.nl, on May 13, 2017, the fact-checking website Snopes reported. The original title did not reference Muslims or migrants.

Dumpert / Via dumpert.nl

A day later, on May 14, Dutch police found and arrested the attacker thanks to the posted video, according to a report from De Telegraaf, a Dutch news organization.

The news report neither mentions the 16-year-old boy's religion or if he's a migrant, but does say his hometown is Monnickendam, a small town in the Netherlands.

So how did the words "Muslim" and "migrant," associated with a video showing a Dutch boy beating up another Dutch boy, appear? It looks like it began with a pro-Trump Twitter account.

Via Twitter: @StockMonsterVIP

The account, StockMonsterVIP tweeted the video with the Dutch website's logo in the upper-right corner and added the word "migrant." StockMonsterVIP's tweet came just a day after it was originally posted there, and on the same day as the teen's arrest, May 13, 2017.

The video received at least 5,037 retweets. (StockMonsterVIP appears to have retweeted a now deleted tweet by the Twitter account SaveTWest, an unverified account that claims to be an "anti-establishment news source.")

The Twitter account, which often tweets pro-Trump memes and news reporters, is also followed by retired Lt. Gen. and ousted Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, as well as President Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., who is very active on Twitter.

Via Twitter: @StockMonsterVIP

Also in May, the video made rounds on the notorious and pro-Trump Reddit forum, The_Donald, receiving 224 comments.

Via reddit.com

And the word "Muslim"? Just one day after the video appeared on the internet, anti-Muslim activist Pamela Geller posted the video on her website with the title: "VIDEO: Muslim Migrant beats up helpless disabled Dutch boy on crutches."

Via pamelageller.com

"More of the diversity and multiculturalism Syrian refugees bring to the West," Geller wrote. "This is what the Democrats want for disabled Americans."

Geller also tweeted a link to her story containing the video.

Via Twitter: @PamelaGeller

The next day, Alex Jones' website Prison Planet also posted Geller's post — with "Muslim Migrant" in the headline — along with the video.

Via prisonplanet.com

Paul Joseph Watson, an editor at Infowars — the Alex Jones media property, which also owns Prison Planet — tweeted a critique about Trump's retweet, questioning the "optics" of retweeting Britain First.

When asked if it's also "not great optics" for the video and headline to be posted on the website for which he works — and was sourced from an anti-Muslim activist — Watson said, "I didn't comment on the content of the videos, I commented on the optics of retweeting Britain First."

"I wrote in the past about Syrian rebels ransacking Christian churches, as seen in the video Trump retweeted," Watson continued, implying his tweet was in reference to another other video retweeted by Trump.

Months after the words Muslim and migrant were added to the video, it reappeared on the video-sharing website, LiveLeak, on August 28, 2017, according to Snopes.

Via liveleak.com

This time the title was, "Refugee beats up Dutch boy on crutches."

A little more than a month later, the far-right and fringe British political group's deputy leader, Jayda Fransen, tweeted the video for the first time.

Fransen posted the same video almost two months later.

It is unclear how President Trump, who does not follow Fransen, came across the video, but conservative writer and commentator Ann Coulter, who Trump does follow, retweeted the video on the same day Fransen posted it for the second time on her account.

Still, it's not even clear Trump himself hit the RT button.

White House Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah was asked how the president came across the video on Wednesday. He responded, "Look, we are not going to be focusing on process. I know you guys want to. We are going to be focusing on the issues."

Charlie Warzel contributed to this report.

Thumbnail and social share image by Susan Watts/NY Daily News via Getty Images.

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