rigorousintuition.ca

Hello. Long-time lurker, first time poster here. A friend pointed out something very odd to me in an email, which I thought I'd share here. I'm admittedly not very aware of how Youtube works and perhaps there's a simple explanation, but if you go to Rep. Giffords' official Youtube page

http://www.youtube.com/user/giffords2

and look at her subscriptions on the bottom left, there are two: one is for Rep. Ike Skelton's channel, and the other is for Jared Lee Loughner's Youtube page.

I was curious if someone with more knowledge of Youtube than me knows whether only the administrator of Giffords' page can subscribe to others' channels, or can someone else do this? What's more, it seems odd his Youtube channel is still active, given that all his other social media pages have been removed.

Anyway... back to lurking!

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That's weird but I thought of a simple possibility. Someone from her office looked at Loughner's channel yesterday and accidentally hit the subscribe button (which is big and prominent and right next to the channel name). Or intentionally did so, as a means of bookmarking it, without considering that the subscriptions are displayed down where you saw them. (I never noticed this feature until now myself.)

You should hang out!

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GuyWhoInventedFire wrote:I was curious if someone with more knowledge of Youtube than me knows whether only the administrator of Giffords' page can subscribe to others' channels, or can someone else do this?

Only someone with admin privileges to the channel can do that.

Last Visit Date: 13 hours ago

That would make it about 11:30 a.m. Saturday, Arizona Time when the admin last signed in. Meaning Giffords' page could not have been edited since. Giffords was shot "shortly after 10 a.m."

It looks weird, but I think an hour and a half is enough time for a distraught web assistant to make a poor judgment call and link to the suspect's page.

And welcome, btw. No need to lurk.

What you've noticed does seem more than a little interesting to me.

And yes, this could have been done accidentally by someone with authorized access to the congresswoman's YouTube account, but honestly that seems a bit unlikely to me. More probable is JackRiddler's idea of intentionally "bookmarking" the page, but even that seems a little odd.

Yes, GuyWhoInventedFire, I hope you choose not to be a stranger.

If the subscription was made yesterday it would show in the recent activity panel on the channel page. Last activity was 2 days ago.

Intriguing find GuyWhoInventedFire.

P45 wrote:If the subscription was made yesterday it would show in the recent activity panel on the channel page. Last activity was 2 days ago.

Intriguing find GuyWhoInventedFire.

Recent activity seems to show uploads, not subscriptions. Can someone try this with their own youtube and see if the act of adding a subscription shows up there?

JackRiddler wrote:

P45 wrote:If the subscription was made yesterday it would show in the recent activity panel on the channel page. Last activity was 2 days ago.

Intriguing find GuyWhoInventedFire.

Recent activity seems to show uploads, not subscriptions. Can someone try this with their own youtube and see if the act of adding a subscription shows up there?

Tried this before I posted. It shows.

Well then this is very curious then. Thanks.

P45 wrote:

JackRiddler wrote:

P45 wrote:If the subscription was made yesterday it would show in the recent activity panel on the channel page. Last activity was 2 days ago.

Intriguing find GuyWhoInventedFire.

Recent activity seems to show uploads, not subscriptions. Can someone try this with their own youtube and see if the act of adding a subscription shows up there?

Tried this before I posted. It shows.

Well then that really is interesting. When does something become "2 days ago"? (Cos I'd think yesterday would be "Yesterday.") Am not familiar with the conventions of having a Youtube account (or Facetwit or most of these Web 2.0 things).

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Thanks for everyone's replies, and for the welcomes to the board.

My first thought, too, was that a staffer who runs the page probably did it to bookmark Loughner's page. But as others have pointed out, it's in pretty poor taste, and you'd think someone would have removed it by now. You'd also think his Youtube page would have been taken down entirely, as with his MySpace page.

Also, re Jeff's comment, if we're looking at a window from 10am to 11.30am Arizona time... did we know the shooter's identity after an hour and a half? Perhaps a staffer knew the shooter's name before it went public, but I seem to recall his name not being reported until hours later, after Obama spoke. I could be wrong.

I took a couple of screen shots of the congresswoman's YouTube channel, as I won't be surprised when it gets "fixed."

Others might consider doing so themselves.

JackRiddler wrote:

P45 wrote:

JackRiddler wrote:

P45 wrote:If the subscription was made yesterday it would show in the recent activity panel on the channel page. Last activity was 2 days ago.

Intriguing find GuyWhoInventedFire.

Recent activity seems to show uploads, not subscriptions. Can someone try this with their own youtube and see if the act of adding a subscription shows up there?

Tried this before I posted. It shows.

Well then that really is interesting. When does something become "2 days ago"? (Cos I'd think yesterday would be "Yesterday.") Am not familiar with the conventions of having a Youtube account (or Facetwit or most of these Web 2.0 things).

.

Looking at my 'recent activity' on youtube, the subscription I just made shows as '27 minutes ago'. After 24 hours it's 1 day ago or 2 days ago etc. The YT settings dont seem to allow the user to choose what shows in their 'recent activity' but you can choose to disable it.

Also on reflection, even if the admin for Giffords' Youtube channel knew the ID of the suspect so early, it seems unlikely that he or she would both hastily subscribe to his page and then not login again since.

GuyWhoInventedFire wrote:My first thought, too, was that a staffer who runs the page probably did it to bookmark Loughner's page. But as others have pointed out, it's in pretty poor taste, and you'd think someone would have removed it by now. You'd also think his Youtube page would have been taken down entirely, as with his MySpace page..

Welcome to the board! And fascinating find.

Subscribing is a strange thing to do, even if it was done yesterday. It's not like Loughner will be making new videos anytime soon.

Reminds me of when someone edited WWE Wrestling superstar Chris Benoit's wiki to show he had died before the murder-suicide even happened.

But most likely this happened after the media hoopla regarding his youtube postings; though having it publicly show that his channel is subscribed feels a bit odd and of poor choice.