Racist Hate Comments On WA2S YouTube Channel Increase During Past Year (2017) And Trend Appears To Be Growing

​The World Animal Awareness Society saw an increase in racially laced hate comments on the WA2S Films Official YouTube Channel in 2017.

This video, RESCUING ROGUE Season 1 Episode 1 - Pit Bull Starved On Heavy Chain, is being inundated with racially laced comments and the numbers seem to suggest a new trend in attacking animal cruelty subjects with hatred in the form of derogatory and mean spirited rants aimed squarely at degrading the individual using the most sinister imaging of race as possible.

However, beginning on January 15, 2018 (Martin Luther King Jr Day) the World Animal Awareness Society will no longer terminate the comments, we will copy the comments into a database and start to track the use of words, the origin of the words, the trigger videos and so on. The World Animal Awareness Society is about collecting data at important points of intersection between animals and humans, like our American Strays 2030 Project. And as we have observed this trend and its increasing velocity, we believe it may be an important factor in understanding the complex relationships between humans and animals.

Although this one video has seen the brunt of the attacks, many other WA2S videos have also seen the racial attacks amp up. Since the inception of the WA2S Films Official YouTube Channel in 2012, it has been our policy to terminate those comments - as they had been intercepted by our commenting filters, and if this had been a repeat offense by a viewer, the comment abuser would lose the ability to comment on the channel and all WA2S videos.

​The Detroit Dog Saviors episode has received quite a few racially laced comments attacking the person helping the dogs in his neighborhood.  We thought it was possible this video was subject to the abusive comments since the new administration had taken power.

So we also started to look at older videos, like the American Strays Bait Dog episode, that have been posted for a number of years and have amassed hundreds of thousands of views, and we discovered that the increase in racially laced comments have increased noticeably over the past year.
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For a lengthy period of time - possibly 5 years, the WA2S will collect and curate the racially divisive comments across our growing social universe. More than 2, 250,000 people watch WA2S videos every month on YouTube, and more than 24,000,000 pages are reviewed at the main WA2S website each month. We look forward to sharing a capsule collection of commentary in the middle and at the end of this study. It will be quite enlightening to dissect what it all means. Here are a couple of the other heavily targeted videos with racially hurtful comments:

​As the World Animal Awareness Society works all over the world, we looked at this trend in other regions and noticed the same trend - racially motivated hate speech in videos from Houston like the one here - directed at what ever minority is seen as being the "bad guy".  In this instance, non-English speaking people.

Stay tuned for updates on this unique study. subscribe to WA2S Films and get first notice of updates: http://wwwyoutube.com/WA2Sorg