When watching YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, or TikTok, users can easily come across touching social experiment content. A social experiment video is a form of media content that captures the reactions of citizens who observe discomforting situations fabricated by the production team. Therefore, most social experiment content involves creating situations where social minorities face difficulties, such as videos like “What if an injured child falls on a crosswalk?” by the YouTube channel Kizzle. Since the early 2000s, such YouTube videos have been a genre engaging viewers by evoking emotions under the name of “social experiment.” In particular, the show Lee Young-don and Shin Dongyup’s Gentleman, which aired in 2013, received high praise for delivering the message that the world is still a good place. Even today, social experiment YouTube channels such as Kizzle, Wonderman, and One_Meter get millions of views and are consumed as heartwarming content by many.
However, there is an underlying aspect to social experiment content that requires someone’s misfortune as mere content to evoke strong emotions in viewers. In other words, social experiment videos often use sensitive subjects, such as crimes that target social minorities. Such scenarios are criticized for excessively showcasing misfortune and exploiting it as “misery porn.” In fact, many popular videos utilize crimes such as child abuse, youth prostitution, and dating violence. Furthermore, by displaying misery without context, these videos often present vulnerable individuals as objects of pity and sympathy. Such portrayal can lead to issues where viewers solely perceive them as passive victims, people who must receive help from others. Since these portrayals of social minorities are often limited to specific groups, such as women, the disabled, children, and elders, they reinforce biases. The disabled are especially depicted as passive and fragile in social experiment content, which can enhance prejudice in society. Rolling GURU, a disabled YouTuber, pointed out that disabilities in those videos are tools creators use to make desired situations that can be consumed as commodities.
To achieve the goal of raising awareness through the content, shifting the focus from portraying social minorities as tools for entertainment to empowering them as active subjects is essential. For example, a blind YouTuber, OneShotHansol, produces social experiment content encouraging viewers to reflect on themselves for a better society and engages with his viewers to promote social awareness. In this way, social minorities should be in the position to actively shape the discourse. Also, there is a need to stop reproducing and consuming videos that perpetuate a self-soothing narrative that “society is righteous enough to live in.” Ultimately, healthy social experiment content should take its place as a means to improve awareness of social minorities.