The advisors on cybersecurity noticed the “damaged frame” only after the event, requesting the YouTube removals without informing the Canton they were engaged to advise for two months!

The bizarre incident, which was largely ignored for weeks by both the Croatian performer and the city host of the event at St. Jakob-Park stadium on May 17, now finally gets some resolution thanks to the city official who previously had to tackle a hot potato of censorship, bringing even the National Cyber Security Centre in the explanation of the timeline.

The final version of what actually happened looks somewhat different. “Google Switzerland was informed about the damaged frame by the Cybercrime Department of the Canton of Basel-Landschaft on May 23 and asked to remove the content from YouTube”, Bosshardt found out after a deeper dig. “The legal department at Google Switzerland apparently also concluded that it would be problematic if the frame continued to be broadcast on YouTube and blocked the videos accordingly.”

The mentioned Cybercrime Department had acted in an advisory role regarding the cybersecurity of Switzerland’s largest ESC public viewing event. These advisors noticed what is now called a “damaged frame” and attributed it to a third party, a stock footage provider in Australia, only after the event.

And then, it took us weeks to find out that it was exactly the cybersecurity advisor who requested the Eurovision content removal from YouTube. This department, Bosshardt clarified, “is based in a different canton, which is why this information was not automatically shared within the Canton of Basel-Stadt” (the canton that engaged it for the advisory role).

If you can see the following video, thank this privilege to not being in Switzerland!

No Damage Done – Except to YouTubers

In a separate statement to regional daily newspaper bz Basel, Christoph Bosshardt reiterated that Basel-Stadt did not file a complaint about the controversial Eurovision visuals, and added: “No damage has been done.”

But the story doesn’t wrap up so neatly. Besides the general idea that “calls to support a criminal organization are punishable by law in Switzerland”, no clarifications for the takedown of videos from various independent YouTube channels were offered.

Indeed, if calls to support criminal organizations are punishable, then who’s being prosecuted for dispersing this call at Arena Plus? For now, it seems YouTube content creators have taken the direct hit for the “punishable call” projected in front of thousands of stadium visitors – not by these YouTubers who merely documented what was shown, but by the City of Basel. The City that now says, “No damage has been done.”

In fact, in the same bz Basel article, titled “ESC in Basel hacked by Islamists”, Bosshardt offered more background: “The video effects were put together by us, but the person in charge had already acquired the raw material a few years ago.”

So, if we have an event where supposedly “no damage was done”, with outdated materials that circulated on the web for years, and now flashed in front of the Eurovision eyes in speeds that would have to establish subliminal marketing as a source of miraculous influence, and then also this call featuring an email address that doesn’t exist, and a bitcoin wallet that’s been technically dead since 2015… What crime are we actually talking about?

On one hand, we’re told this was a serious security threat worthy of cybercrime intervention. On the other hand, officials downplay the impact. How can it be both – a threat severe enough to pull the plug on YouTube creators, yet also something so inconsequential that “no damage has been done”?

Basel Police: ‘We know nothing’

The bizarre story might end up being as ephemeral as the fleeting frames that launched the avalanche of interpretations.

If what appeared on screen truly qualifies as a crime – punishable by law in Switzerland – then what exactly is law enforcement doing about it? As indicated by bz Basel, not much: “The Basel-Stadt cantonal police have no knowledge of the incident in St. Jakob-Park, according to the police.”

That’s an interesting claim, considering Basel-Stadt cantonal police were formally notified of the incident on June 23^rd – by Pipeaway. In fact, the Department of Justice and Security of the Canton of Basel-Stadt responded to our request for information with an automatic thank-you note, saying: “We will process your message within working days during our office hours.”

In their defense, they didn’t specify within how many working days the answer could be expected. So, on July 1^st, we followed up. Again, no response.

And now? They say that they “have no knowledge of the incident”.

The entire saga of Eurovision’s subliminal whispers might go down in local history as a story of institutional silence, where all included actors, from the artist and the concert management to the police, went mute.

When a vague allegation of conspiracy is used to justify a nationwide censorship (the one Cybercrime Department of the Canton of Basel-Landschaft never even thought of announcing publicly, until pushed by the press), silence is not the best communication tactic.

That is, if the idea of some “Islamist conspiracy” was not just a smoke screen for a completely different story.

Have something to add to this story?
Leave your comment in the section below, and pin the article for later!

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning if you click on them and make a purchase, Pipeaway may make a small commission, at no additional cost to you. Thank you for supporting our work!

Cover/pin image in this article has been sourced from Mood Studios AG via Kanton Basel-Stadt.
Screenshots by Pipeaway.

The post The Eurovision Frame Affair: Baselland Responsible For YouTube Content Removal appeared first on Pipeaway.

Hi from Makarska Riviera!

It seems I’ll spend at least part of my summer here, on the Dalmatian coast, under the majestic peaks of Biokovo Mountain, and in front of some of Croatia‘s finest beaches.

However, I didn’t come here just to switch off and relax, or to hike a mountain in flip-flops (which became a standard no-go scene in local travel safety marketing memes). I’ve arrived at this pretty stretch of the Adriatic coast – to work.

It’s not the first time I’m taking on a summer vacancy instead of a summer vacation, though. A few seasons ago, I started with waiting tables, a job that sometimes required the flexibility of a French contortionist.

This summer, I’ve accepted a new challenge – how to make my wallet happy with one of the most underpaid jobs in the Croatian hospitality industry?

For the hottest Croatian months, just across Hvar, the sunniest European island, I’ll be grinding hard as a bellboy or a porter.

That’s right, if you check in at this adults-only hotel this summer, it will be me assisting you with your luggage, showing you the room, and generally providing customer service at the front desk.

I see the job as just another adventure. It might inform me on the previously unknown aspects of the hospitality industry from the inside. I might even earn a few bucks.

Which reminds me – if you can, try to show your appreciation towards people working in the service industry by tipping them.

Don’t just, like a guest the other day, ask: “Do you expect a tip?”

You will always receive a polite answer (which is a sincere, but not the entire truth) that you shouldn’t worry about it, as that is indeed our job.

Nobody will hate you if you do not leave a tip. They will not spit in your drink nor deprioritize and downgrade the service to you.

However, in the tourism industry, even in countries such as Croatia, which highly depends on it, don’t just assume that the personnel are adequately remunerated. Your small gesture can be a powerful booster for those who serve you.

Here’s a little secret: if you see a lot of foreigners working in some European hotel, for instance, workers arriving from countries such as Argentina, Mexico, the Philippines, etc., don’t just assume you’ve arrived at a multicultural place. The truth behind it might be that some tourism jobs have been so devalued in terms of salaries that only visitors from the “third countries” can afford to do them.

So if it is within your budget, and you appreciate the efforts of those serving you at vacation, a little tip can go a long way.

Have a tip-giving week,

Ivan Kralj        
Pipeaway.com

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning if you click on them and make a purchase, Pipeaway may make a small commission, at no additional cost to you. Thank you for supporting our work!

The post 💰 Don’t Just Check In. Chip In! – Pipeaway Newsletter #177 appeared first on Pipeaway.

Hi from Croatia!

As you read this pre-written newsletter, I’ll be driving again, to the coast of the country that, this season, promotes itself with the “Find your pomalo” campaign.

No, not that monster citrus from Southeast Asia (that’s pomelo!), but ‘pomalo’ – the Croatian way of saying: slow down and enjoy the moment.

At the same time that the Ultra Europe electronic music festival brings thousands of young and loud tourists to Split, the country aims to advertise the Mediterranean as it once was: unhurried and stress-free.

It’s nothing close to the Laziest Person in the World competition, as they have in Montenegro. Still, concepts of taking a break in siesta, riposo, or inemuri kind of way are well-established around the world.

As learned previously, tourism marketing campaigns can be a top or a flop, so it remains to be seen whether Croatia’s bet on pomalo (especially, when tourism prices grow naveliko, or – at large) will find its audience.

When there is a lot of money invested in a PR campaign, it’s natural that those marketing videos will be under special scrutiny. But if you just want to memorize a personal trip, following basic rules for making travel videos can elevate your creation. Nowadays, you can even engage an AI to help you compose your travel video faster, and possibly even better than an average user could ever do.

But don’t think that employing AI will protect you from your audience’s close examination. I found that out when, even if only to illustrate the omnipresent AI cat Olympics topic, I created a Zoolympics video, a fantasy-based diving competition of cows, lions, and elephants.

“Thanks for the AI slop”, commented one viewer.

It reminded me of a similar comment a reader sent when I published an article on strange hostel experiences. For this person, it was unforgivable that I used AI to illustrate real-life hostel anecdotes that ranged from bizarre to kinky.

“Thanks for stealing artists’ work for these AI slop illustrations. They suck”, a disgruntled commenter said.

I understand, people are increasingly allergic to the artificial intelligence invading all pores of our online and offline life.

I’d love us to have a sustainable system that pays real artists creating high-budget CGI, which could compete in speed with free tools lying around.

However, in the current state of the internet, when search engines steal from us, content creators, exactly through employing AI to scrape our write-ups (taking not only readers, but also our ad income), using AI is sometimes the only feasible way to fight back.

Indeed, AI opened a Pandora’s box of dilemmas. The fact is, the genie is already outside, messing up the entire world of not just artistic creation, but – information.

It’s hard to predict how we will get out of that (lack of) labeling mess, as search engines don’t seem interested enough to demote AI content versus human-intelligence content, simply because they profit from it.

The result? The internet is flooded with fake content presented as real, AI-generated garbage delivered as some perversion of new journalism.

That’s the real issue with artificial intelligence. Not when small creators use it to illustrate a point, but when big players use it to reap financial gains at the expense of the entire web ecosystem. The world they are creating is making consumers distrust everything as unreal. And that process might be irreversible.

What do you think about that?

Have a real-intelligence week,

Ivan Kralj        
Pipeaway.com

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning if you click on them and make a purchase, Pipeaway may make a small commission, at no additional cost to you. Thank you for supporting our work!

The post 🤖 Thanks for the AI Slop – Pipeaway Newsletter #176 appeared first on Pipeaway.

Hi from Croatia!

I left Switzerland, but Switzerland cannot leave me.

It turned out that the Baby Lasagna controversy, which Pipeaway was the first (and so far the only one) to cover, is a Eurovision drama that just keeps unfolding.

Just last week, this is what happened:

– videos containing subliminal messages calling for Islamic struggle funding were blocked on Swiss YouTube, “due to a legal complaint from the government”
– Basel City finally issued a statement on the Arena Plus incident, pulling the National Cyber Security Centre into the story
– NCSC denied its involvement in the video takedown

So, what we have today is the largest Eurovision public viewing event essentially being deleted from memory, and a government entity that pulled the strings not having the balls to explain this Swiss-wide YouTube censorship. With the lack of media pressure, they surely won’t feel the urge to do it, anyway.

This is not the first time that governments (or governing bodies) have gotten confused while trying to achieve the perfect balance between political correctness, the most rewarding actions (or lack of action), and doing the right thing.

While we still speak Eurovision, my hometown of Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, hosted the 1990 contest. At the end of the communist era, the Italian winner Toto Cutugno sang about a united Europe.

Now, 35 years later, despite its “United by Music” motto, Europe is not insieme. It was exactly Italy, together with Germany (countries known for choosing the right side of history, as some online commenters noticed), who supposedly took bullets for Israel when members like Spain, Iceland, and Slovenia pushed the topic of the Eurovision Israel boycott at last week’s EBU‘s General Assembly.

With the help of the UK (BBC, once considered the bastion of professionalism, now faces over 100 of its journalists admitting they are forced to do pro-Israel PR), Israel found new reserves of international patience, with its destiny at the song contest postponed until winter, when Gaza situation (or what is left of it) will be reassessed.

Did you expect anything different? If official Europe can tolerate a genocide at its doorstep, it can certainly clap to the genocider’s songs too.

Croatia also showed its weaker colors this weekend, exposing how easily politics exploits music for achieving dubious goals. Marko Perković Thompson, a singer generously labeled as controversial, held what wants to promote itself as the largest paid concert in the world, while igniting the most primitive set of national passions. Half a million attendees is an inflated number, but it still shows how massive and profiteering the performances of nationalism can be.

Revived fascist shouts and songs, dressed in a patriotic-religious theater, with a drone-apparition of Our Lady in the skies, isn’t just a highly produced kitsch (its extremity comparable to the amount of real trash left by the concert attendees). The silence of political voices, as well as turning a blind eye by those in power who would love a bit of that profit, shows how easily we can sell the most cherished ideals and buy some fake lie as a cornerstone of our beliefs.

Speaking of these trades, Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, explained how corporations sustain and profit from genocide.

In what she calls occupation tourism, major online travel platforms, such as Booking.com and Airbnb, list properties in Israeli colonies, which restrict Palestinian access to land, and whitewash Zionist settlers as a “warm and loving community”.

If you need more resources on how your money funds terrorism, you don’t need to look for subliminal messages in popular events. Here is one ethical consumption guide to consult.

Our leaders, our companies, and our song contests find the complicity profitable. It doesn’t matter if they are bought, blackmailed, or brainwashed. Choosing silence is always choosing the wrong side.

In a hen full of chickens, our civilization cries for roosters.

Have a loud week,

Ivan Kralj        
Pipeaway.com

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning if you click on them and make a purchase, Pipeaway may make a small commission, at no additional cost to you. Thank you for supporting our work!

The post 🐓 Rooster Wanted – Pipeaway Newsletter #175 appeared first on Pipeaway.

From a cybersecurity perspective, the NCSC does not see any issues with the video in questionManuela Sonderegger, National Cyber Security Centre

To rewind, Pipeaway first spotted the suspicious flash screens in Baby Lasagna act shortly after the May 17 event. One of these brief visual appearances contained a message urging secret support for jihad. The City of Basel, as the organizer, as well as the Croatian musician, both went silent as soon as we brought the topic to their attention, more than once.

However, two weeks after the original article was published on June 14, all YouTube creators who’d uploaded videos of the Arena Plus event began receiving takedown notices in Switzerland, citing government legal complaints.

In Basel City’s response, Christoph Bosshardt, Head of External Affairs and Marketing for the Canton of Basel-Stadt, explained that problematic material originated from stock footage (licensed pre-recorded video clips) and was not noticed before the show. “When the hidden frame was detected, the stock footage platform was informed, and the incident was reported to the National Cyber Security Centre”, Bosshardt said. “Whilst there was never an intention to censor the show, Basel supports any measures that prevent the spread of harmful hidden messages and does not want Arena Plus or any of its other events to be a platform for such content.”

But now, the very same National Cyber Security Centre says not only that they didn’t have anything to do with the takedown case, but that, from a cybersecurity perspective, they also don’t see any issues in the video.

Switzerland’s Cyber Watchdogs Say Baby Lasagna Video Not a Threat

“The NCSC is mandated by federal law to protect Switzerland’s critical infrastructure from cyber threats and to increase Switzerland’s cyber resilience”, said Manuela Sonderegger, Head of Information and Media at the Federal Department of Defence, Civil Protection and Sport within the NCSC.

“The NCSC is not a law enforcement agency and therefore has no investigative mandate. We are therefore unaware of why the YouTube video you mentioned was blocked, as this does not fall within our duties. We can confirm that the NCSC did not request Google/YouTube to block or restrict any content”, the agency told Pipeaway.

The statement doubles down on this point: “The NCSC has not been involved in this case and will not be looking into it, as it does not fall within our duties”.

Specifically asked about the danger of subliminal messages in the modern online environment, Mrs. Sonderegger was quite clear: “From a cybersecurity perspective, the NCSC does not see any issues with the video in question.”

“We Support Preventive Measures” – Just Don’t Ask Who Took Them

So if YouTube really did remove Arena Plus videos “to comply with local laws”, questions remain. Which laws were broken? And which government entity filed the legal complaint?

In the context of what Basel City said, Mr. Bosshardt’s statement now appears incomplete at best, misleading at worst.

Were “harmful hidden messages” harmful for the audience, or the reputation of Basel City?

The National Cyber Security Centre, the only government body Basel City claimed to communicate with, as an official competence center for cybersecurity, has firmly denied any involvement and sees no cybersecurity threat in the footage.

Also, if it took only one working day for NCSC to respond to Pipeaway’s inquiry, it surely took the same amount of time to tell the City of Basel there was no cybersecurity threat. So why did the City even mention this agency in their public statement?

Were “harmful hidden messages”, labeled as such by the City of Basel, harmful to the audiences, or harmful to the reputation of the organizer of the event, flashing unchecked footage in front of the eyes of 36.000 stadium visitors?

Of course, when YouTube mentions “government entity” requesting the blockage of certain content, this entity could have easily been the City of Basel. But if they did trigger the takedown, why did they not clearly take the responsibility for the action?

Instead of a straightforward explanation, we were left with a PR riddle: “We didn’t mean to censor, but we support preventive measures against the spread of harmful hidden messages.”

Mr. Bosshardt could undoubtedly clarify this situation. But until July 21, he is officially “out of office”.

After Mr. Bosshardt's return from holiday, we have received the newest Basel City explanation: it was the Cybercrime Department of the Canton of Basel-Landschaft that initiated the video removal from Google, essentially disagreeing with NCSC's point of view on the matter.

What do you think about this drama unfolding?
Feel free to express your opinion in the comment section, and pin this article for later!

The post Swiss National Cyber Security Centre Denies Role in Arena Plus Video Takedown appeared first on Pipeaway.

The problematic message was buried inside third-party stock footage used at the event. Once detected, the case was handed over to Switzerland’s National Cyber Security Centre

With 36.000 stadium attendees, the Arena Plus event in Basel was supposed to be remembered as the greatest public viewing of the Eurovision Song Contest. But now, memory is being erased, with cold black screens showing up instead of all YouTube footage of the show in Switzerland.

The purge came after Pipeaway revealed that subliminal messages had been projected on the stadium’s screen cube during Croatian star Marko Purišić’s performance (you might know him better as Baby Lasagna – more on the controversy here). Among the flashing frames: an image calling for anonymous donations to jihad.

What some Eurovision fans initially dismissed as a hoax, YouTube has now confirmed as very real. And with the platform removing Arena Plus videos on request from Swiss authorities, Basel City has at last issued its side of the story.

According to them, the message was buried inside third-party stock footage used at the event – footage that slipped past organizers unnoticed. Once detected, the case was handed over to Switzerland’s National Cyber Security Centre (read the NCSC statement here).

Still, the city downplays the visuals’ impact, insisting the frames (appearing three times during the “Rim Tim Tagi Dim” performance) lasted only “a split second” and were “not visible to guests in the Arena Plus”.

Yet there’s a curious contradiction here: if the messages were imperceptible – as subliminals are designed to be – why did those “invisible” frames become harmful as soon as they went online? Why was the footage not deemed inappropriate for only Basel-owned platforms, but was instead subjected to full-scale YouTube censorship?

Emails also went subliminal

In Basel’s official statement, Christoph Bosshardt – Head of External Affairs and Marketing in the Department of Presidential Affairs of the Canton of Basel-Stadt – offered an apology for Pipeaway’s repeated emails “going unnoticed” at media-arenaplus@bs.ch. “This email address is no longer used since the event is over”, explained Mr. Bosshardt.

We should clarify, however, that Pipeaway’s inquiries to the official media contact for the event were sent on May 20^th, May 21^st, June 10^th, and June 23^rd. Only the final message bounced back as “not delivered”.

In fact, the first information request on the authorship of the cube visuals that turned problematic was sent practically on the second working day after the Eurovision finale – on Tuesday, for the event that finished in the early hours of Sunday, May 18^th. That’s hardly a late or unreasonable follow-up.

It is somewhat odd that emails go unnoticed on the email address set up specifically and only so that media inquiries could get noticed, especially when the largest cultural event of Basel’s year is in question.

When an event ends with a cybersecurity investigation, one would expect a bit more attention to the inbox.

The Show Must Go Off

To close, here is the full response from Basel City – the first and only official comment addressing the mysterious subliminal frame that flickered through the Arena Plus show.

Basel supports any measures that prevent the spread of harmful hidden messages and does not want Arena Plus or any of its other events to be a platform for such contentChristoph Bosshardt

Below is the statement in its entirety:

The City of Basel is proud to have hosted the Arena plus Public Viewing Show with many great artists. Videos of the event and the great atmosphere have been widely shared on Social Media, for example on @eurovisioncountdown, where they can still be found.

As part of the live show, stock footage was used on the screens. After the show in May, it was brought to the organisers’ attention that a hidden frame appeared in the footage. This frame lasted for a split second and thus went unnoticed during the preparations of the screen content; also, it was not visible to guests in the Arena Plus. When the hidden frame was detected, the stock footage platform was informed, and the incident was reported to the National Cyber Security Centre.

Whilst there was never an intention to censor the show, Basel supports any measures that prevent the spread of harmful hidden messages and does not want Arena Plus or any of its other events to be a platform for such content.

Best regards,

Christoph Bosshardt
Head of External Affairs and Marketing
Department of Presidential Affairs of the Canton of Basel-Stadt

After his return from holiday, Christoph Bosshardt issued a new statement that sheds a different light on what actually happened after Arena Plus - check it out here!

What do you think about Basel City’s reaction to the content security breach?
Leave your comment below, and pin this article for later!

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning if you click on them and make a purchase, Pipeaway may make a small commission, at no additional cost to you. Thank you for supporting our work!

Images in this article have been sourced from Mood Studios AG via Kanton Basel-Stadt.

The post Basel City Speaks Up After “Harmful Hidden Messages” Found at Eurovision: ‘We Never Intended to Censor the Show’ appeared first on Pipeaway.

YouTube removes content where necessary to comply with local lawsYouTube

As we first reported from St. Jakob-Park stadium – the site of the largest ESC Basel public viewing event – Croatian artist Baby Lasagna (real name Marko Purišić) took the stage on May 17th. But while the audience was swept up in the glittery chaos of Eurovision kitsch, a different show was playing out on the massive screens.

Hidden within the on-stage visuals, subliminal messages flashed for just a single frame each. Among the pixelated whispers: a call to fund jihad, complete with a crypto wallet address traced back to Islamic struggle action from over a decade ago.

Despite multiple inquiries to both Baby Lasagna and the City of Basel, the event’s organizer, no one stepped forward to explain how these digital Easter eggs made it onto the screen, or who planted them.

Now, YouTube videos showing the incident have vanished in Switzerland, blocked with little fanfare. Creators who uploaded footage from the stadium received a concise message: “We have received a legal complaint from a government entity regarding your content.”

Most of these uploaders had no idea their clips might contain something problematic. Pipeaway was the only international media outlet covering this story.

“YouTube removes content where necessary to comply with local laws”, the e-mail titled YouTube Video Blocked: Government Request said.

While the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) still juggles with old hot potatoes, including televote controversies and the never louder question of why is Israel in Eurovision, it seems the subliminal scandal poses fresh questions.

It’s not enough to just shift the responsibility to the City of Basel as an organizer of the event if the attendees (fans of Eurovision!) can so easily get exposed to something considered dangerous enough to file an official takedown request.

After all, if this happens, we are not talking about just some fringe online conspiracy, but about a real-world hazard that demands answers.

This is one of the videos you cannot see anymore in Switzerland. All because of what happens at around 00:54, for a frame of a second!

What do Swiss laws say?

According to Article 260 of the Swiss Penal Code, anyone who supports a criminal or terrorist organization in its activities can face up to ten years in prison or a significant financial fine.

Additionally, a paragraph focused on the financing of terrorism says that “anyone who, intending to finance a criminal act aimed at intimidating a population or coercing a state or international organization into doing or refraining from doing something, collects or provides funds shall be liable to a custodial sentence of up to five years or to a monetary penalty”.

At this point, it’s still unclear whether Swiss police are heading in this direction, or even who could be under suspicion for the action that initiated the total pull-out request from YouTube on Swiss territory.

Is the Croatian musician, the City of Basel, or the technical team of Swiss national broadcaster SSR-SRG (which may have handled the arena’s video feeds) under investigation?

Pipeaway has reached out to the authorities for clarification and will update this story as soon as more information becomes available.

Read Basel City's statement on how they found "harmful hidden messages" and what they did afterwards! Also, check out what National Cyber Security Centre had to say about this "threat"!

Between Vylan and villain – Switzerland deletes Lasagna

As the original article explained, the entire case is shrouded in mystery. If Baby Lasagna’s subliminal messages were an intentional artistic statement, why has the author not owned them? If the performance was hijacked, why haven’t the artist and the organizers come out to condemn it?

Instead, the first real move came not from the artist, nor the event hosts, but from Swiss authorities, who initiated YouTube takedowns of the performance across Switzerland. It feels less like censorship and more like an effort to drain the swamp of speculation – step one in figuring out what actually happened on that Basel stage.

Swiss YouTube block for Baby Lasagna arrives after British police started investigating Bob Vylan’s “Death to the IDF” and before Thompson, Croatia’s most controversial artist, hosts the largest concert in the world

The timeline offers more than coincidence. The performance took place just two days after Switzerland officially banned Hamas and its proxy groups – and in that light, the authorities may appear unwilling to leave any potential provocations to chance.

However, this reaction landed silently, while Europe was already buzzing about what should or shouldn’t be allowed on concert stages.

It all happened just after British police opened a criminal investigation into Bob Vylan’s performance at Glastonbury Festival, where he led crowds in chanting “Death, death to the IDF”.

Baby Lasagna’s Swiss YouTube ban also comes several days before his namesake, Marko Perković Thompson, Croatia’s most divisive musician, is expected to draw half a million fans to Zagreb’s Hippodrome in what should become the world’s largest paid concert. Thompson, who has a long track record of glorifying the fascist Ustaše regime, has been banned in several countries (including Switzerland) – yet Croatian authorities rarely act, despite the neo-Nazi salutes, symbols, and disturbing messages his shows often feature.

Before chanting “Death to the IDF” at Glastonbury Festival, English punk rapper Bob Vylan explained his not-at-all-subliminal message!

Lasagna-style layers of silence

Engaged musicians always had politically loud voices. Some use them for good, others against it.

Somewhere between Vylan and Thompson (and arguably miles apart from both), Baby Lasagna now floats in limbo: one of Croatia’s most successful Eurovision stars, yet oddly silent the moment one website asked what exactly had flashed beneath his feet, secretly served to 36,000 unsuspecting concert visitors.

Swiss authorities, not just geographically between Brits and Croats, for now, haven’t jumped into the anti-Semitic witch hunt targeting pro-Palestine performers like their UK colleagues did. Nor have they embraced the Croatian-style silence, where radical speech cloaks in “patriotic” banners.

For now, in the tradition of Helvetic neutrality, Switzerland has quietly limited public access to Baby Lasagna’s footage, claiming it doesn’t “comply with local law”.

Instead of just “punishing” YouTube uploaders who documented the public concert only to have it excluded from views in the host country of Eurovision, the authorities will have to say – clearly – which laws have been broken, and who is the culprit.

What do you think about the Swiss authorities taking down all YouTube videos featuring Baby Lasagna’s subliminal messages?
Leave your comments below and pin this article for later!     

The post Disappearing Act: Baby Lasagna’s Performance Videos Banned in Switzerland appeared first on Pipeaway.

Hi from Zagreb!

The first half of 2025 is officially behind us, and my hometown visits have barely accumulated to three and a half weeks in total.

I’m not intentionally running away from Croatia, but it seems that this year I’ve spent more time in Malaysia, Thailand, or Switzerland than in the country where I was born 46 years ago. So many years have passed indeed; my birthday was last week, so I know I didn’t miscalculate.

If it does seem I’m running around, it’s because I’m trying to take care of myself the best way that I can.

The world is changing at a pace so fast that living in the past will leave you stuck. The artificial intelligence lobbies and Silicon Valley masterminds have engineered a system in which space for human-first journalism is continually shrinking, and short-term profit goals precede everything – whether it’s controlling political narratives or your local search engine results.

Last week, I published an article analyzing why we keep falling for this stuff (namely, through the example of AI-generated videos).

You might think our digital naivety is a far cry from travel blogging, but that would be just naive. In a digital environment, where our content fuels the profit of the powerful few, it would be ignorant to think we all simply have a choice.

Google and alike ARE killing the internet as we know it. When you think about it, the biggest search engine is just another website. If you imagine a website that would be stealing other people’s content (with the massive help of AI), you’d probably call it what it is – a theft (Google itself will deindex websites that plagiarize original content!). Only because this particular website, Google, is a powerful player, you won’t read many critical essays about it in the dependent mainstream media, or see the violation of author rights being prosecuted.

We’ve been through the same thing before, with social media becoming an alternative to mainstream media. Instead of companies paying professional journalists to distribute their work (entities called media), the new rulers of the digital information became those with a radically different business logic – creators have to pay THEM if they want their professional work to be seen (social media algorithms).

A similar trap is set up again. Experts are convincing us that search engine optimization is not dead; we all just need to adapt and learn how to adjust our content so it gets picked up by AI and served in those AI overviews on top of Google results.

That’s right, the suggested solution to the problem is not, for instance, disallowing AI to scrape content without paying for the author rights. They want us to see being chosen by a thief as a victory. Soon, they’ll make us pay to be “chosen”, and we should learn to see that as a victory, too?

Marek Bron, from Indie Traveller, recently reflected on the topic (you can read it here), revealing that he felt the urge to start explicitly stating that “the travel guides you read here are based on real trips and written by real people” (sic!). Soon, we will all be proving we are real.

I was thinking about that last week, when a reader on Bluesky targeted my exclusive report on Baby Lasagna‘s subliminal messages in Basel as my fabrication.

This supposed Eurovision fan asked everyone to report my post, saying: “Stop spreading false claims. This didn’t happen, and you have no evidence for it. It’s just an altered image that you place deep below in the article.”

Later on, they continued: “How can we know you haven’t just photoshopped the image? And then, ask people to do a difficult task requiring technical software that you know an average person won’t do?”

(You can read the entire Blusky chain here.)

This silly tweet-rant shows how easy it’s become to discredit professional journalism, despite all sources for the story being completely public. Everything someone dislikes can now effortlessly be debunked as propaganda, or anti-somethingism. It works in Israel, it works in Sweden, it works in every damn place.

We’ve normalized distrust. It is now photographers who have to prove they are not photoshopping; it is journalists who have to prove they are real people.

In times when everything can be faked, how can we trust what’s true? AI has undermined the very concept of evidence. If so many things around us are fake, from images to videos, we seem to go to extremes. We either believe everything that’s served, or we start doubting everything, even the truth.

The AI itself agreed when I asked it to explain the phenomenon: “Overexposure to manipulated content breeds cynicism and apathy, especially online. Instead of fostering skepticism (questioning claims), it can lead to nihilism (disbelieving all claims).”

ChatGPT even offered an example: “In conflict zones (Ukraine, Gaza, Syria), AI-generated or mislabeled footage circulates widely. In response, people may begin to assume all war footage is fake – even authentic atrocities.”

It’s ridiculous. AI bots can explain to us how we are being brainwashed in real time, to not see reality, even when that reality clearly is a genocide. And yet, we still stumble at a basic critical thinking effort.

Constantly having to ask “Is this real?” is mentally exhausting. When everything might be fake, journalism is in crisis, people disengage, and conspiracy theories and manipulation thrive.

The danger isn’t just that people believe lies. It’s that they stop believing anything.

Have a critical-thinking week!

Ivan Kralj        
Pipeaway.com

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning if you click on them and make a purchase, Pipeaway may make a small commission, at no additional cost to you. Thank you for supporting our work!

The post ✍️ This Was Written by a Real Person. Probably. – Pipeaway Newsletter #174 appeared first on Pipeaway.

There’s a sucker born every minuteP.T. Barnum

Cats were among the first social media stars to break the internet. Since Charlie Schmidt uploaded his “Keyboard Cat” to YouTube in 2007, the viral video has amassed more than 2 million likes.

But when, last week, Pablo Jiménez prompted Hailuo 02 (an AI model by China‘s MiniMax) to generate a Cat Olympics reel, pool-diving cats collected nearly 10 million Instagram likes in just five days!

The newest trending meme showed that cats still rule the web, but it also reaffirmed P.T. Barnum‘s alleged theory that “there’s a sucker born every minute”.

“No way, they are better swimmers than me”, one awestruck commenter said.

Naturally, Dog Olympics followed the viral trend shortly after. A worried animal lover pleaded: “But why do dogs and cats do this??? Respect their nature, not your ambitions!!!!”

There was even a detective mind who didn’t find it suspicious that our furry pets exhibit such a graceful athleticism. Something else informed their scrutiny: “I don’t think this is real, there aren’t the right number of Olympic rings.”

The same week, many fell for a scuba diving dog, too, someone calling it “the luckiest dog in the world”.

Are we just soft for pets, or is our gullibility – that glitch in human design – the easiest button to push?

If you’re more into meerkats than cats, I made my own experimental animal diving competition video with Hailuo. Check out the Zoolympics!

TL;DR: Scuba-diving dogs. Cats doing Olympic backflips. Pope in a Balenciaga coat. Every new wave of AI-generated content exposes an old truth: people will believe just about anything if it looks real enough. But this gullibility isn’t new. From spirit photography to Photoshop, humanity has always stumbled through the early stages of new technologies. This article dives into our recurring trust in the unreal, unpacks the psychology behind digital belief, and asks: why do we keep falling for it, and what can we do about it?

Fake It Till You Monetize – Inside the AI Gold Rush

I’ve written before about how artificial intelligence is (ab)used to capitalize on our trust. From Glasgow‘s sour Willy’s Chocolate Experience to an entire AI art Facebook trend, the scam didn’t need to be sophisticated. Even in the early days of generative AI, when a subject could never have too many fingers, and buildings melted against the laws of physics, those images were still successful fraud traps for unskeptical observers.

Now, as text-to-video AI generators step up the game, distinguishing between AI BS and the real thing is becoming an even greater challenge for many.

All those “photographs” of adorable tiny homes and mountain logs of yesteryears have evolved into enticing moving images of “magical retreats”. You can now vividly imagine yourself stepping into this parallel universe where noiseless houses stand on “soft white sand beach”, hobbit homes “glow softly with lantern lights”, and your infinity pool spills into a Jurassic waterfall. All of it looks like something out of a dream, but many cannot call it.

Check it out – artificial visuals, artificial voice, real engagement!

Despite flooding different Facebook pages, these concrete AI videos all lead back to one shadowy source – Vacarino LLC. The owner of the website, which, nota bene, uses stock photographs, has a hidden identity. While Facebook pages seem to be based in Texas or California, and their AI properties are located in, well, Neverland, the linked website rents villas in – Italy. Under each property in Aosta Valley, Lazio, and Le Marche, reviews left by guests are obviously fake. They are even feverishly posted within minutes of each other. Everything screams red flag.

Last year, 404 Media discovered that Facebook/Meta has been paying people to generate viral AI images, offering up to $100 for every 1,000 likes through its Creator Bonus Program. Twitter/X‘s incentive scheme also turned out to stimulate AI slop, emotionally manipulative, algorithm-pleasing fluff that gamifies gullibility.

The earning potential of AI-generated videos, which often receive over 100,000 likes, is thus enormous.

With AI-generated videos now regularly collecting hundreds of thousands of likes, it’s easy to see why this ecosystem thrives. It doesn’t matter if the story features birds nesting in flowers during a storm, a civilian Father Christmas rescuing a whale family, or an Arctic wolf heroically saving a trapped penguin by bringing it to humans. If it looks kind, cute, or just shareable, it prints engagement.

And where there’s engagement, there’s money.

How many outfits do you need to change to rescue a penguin? Apparently, at least three.

Ctrl+Alt+Believe – Gen Z & Critical Thinking

You might assume that only your mom or grandma would fall for this stuff. But studies show that even Gen Z, the generation raised with smartphones practically welded to their hands, struggles to separate fact from fiction online. In fact, they might be the worst at it.

Born between 1997 and 2012, Gen Z is often praised for its digital fluency. But fluency isn’t the same as literacy. Being constantly online doesn’t make you any better at telling what’s real. According to research, digital natives are surprisingly prone to digital naivety.

Part of the problem? Critical thinking is rarely taught, especially not at the speed needed to keep up with fast-evolving technologies. Schools struggle to update syllabi quickly enough. So while students might know how to use ChatGPT to do their homework, they’re not necessarily taught how to question what shows up in those chats.

It’s tempting to look at the rise of AI-generated content and blame it on a shocking new ignorance – a sign of the modern mind’s decay. But the truth is less clickbaity and more human: we’ve always been like this.

Our tendency to trust, to be wowed by novelty, isn’t new. It’s hardwired.

History shows that every time a new technology emerges, humans go through a predictable honeymoon phase: a new tool appears → we lack the experience to understand it → blind belief ensues. From photography to radio to television to deepfakes, the pattern is reliable.

Want proof? Let’s take a look.

History of technological naivety

1. The Lie of the Lens – Early Photography

Before photography was invented in the 1820s, the closest thing to “capturing reality” was a painted portrait – expensive, time-consuming, and always at the mercy of the painter’s imagination. The level of detail and striking realism in early photographs was reminiscent of painted portraits, leading some people to struggle with distinguishing between the two media.

To many, the process seemed downright supernatural and unsettling. What kind of machine could trap a person’s image so perfectly? Some believed photography had the power to steal your soul. Others feared it could alter your very being, hesitating to get photographed. In the same way that some now worry AI will replace humans, 19th-century minds saw early cameras as something between dark magic and dangerous science.

Photography also struggled to be perceived as art, because it felt mechanical, detached, and thoughtless (as effortless as we could see pressing the “generate AI” button today).

Meanwhile, traditional artists of the time felt threatened by the new technology, fearing that once color photography got perfected, they would all be deemed useless and lose their jobs. Sound familiar?

Before the public had time to question how photographs were made, or how they could be manipulated and retouched, the camera quickly gained a reputation as a truth machine. If it were in a photo, it had to be real. That belief made fertile ground for fraud.

In the 1860s, William H. Mumler launched a booming business in “spirit photography” – portraits in which ghostly figures of the dead floated beside their grieving loved ones. Today, we know it was just a clever use of double exposure, but at the time, photography experts couldn’t crack the trick. The images were so emotionally powerful, so technically mysterious, that people suspended disbelief.

Paradoxically, P.T. Barnum, a showman legendary for his hoaxes, testified against Mumler in court, accusing him of profiting off grief. The prosecution, however, couldn’t prove beyond a doubt that spirit photography was a fabrication, so its inventor walked free.

The debates about Spiritualism were especially strong in the 1920s, with two unlikely opponents. Arthur Conan Doyle, a man of science and the father of the most famous detective Sherlock Holmes, was a true believer in spirit photography. The rational mind was coming from the world of trickery – magician Harry Houdini, a devoted skeptic, made it a personal mission to debunk fraudulent mediums.

2. Hello, Hell? – The Telephone’s Spooky Beginnings

For centuries, long-distance communication meant waiting days or weeks for letters, or if you insisted on faster delivery, relying on smoke signals, flags, lights, and carrier pigeons. So when the telephone arrived in the 1870s, thanks to Alexander Graham Bell, the idea that someone’s actual voice could travel through wires and speak to you in real time felt, to many, like sorcery.

It was comparable to how spiritualists communicated with the dead. Suddenly, disembodied voices spoke from little boxes on the wall. Was it innovation, or necromancy? From the altars, priests spoke about the spooky telephone as a devil’s tool.

But the fears weren’t limited to the spiritual realm. Many believed the telephone was magnetic to thunder, that it could attract lightning strikes. Elderly people were afraid to touch the device, worried it might shock or electrocute them.

Some with chronic pain, however, took the opposite view: they believed those mysterious electric pulses might offer a cure for rheumatism.

Leaning on the booming pseudoscientific trend of electrotherapy at the time, one popular folk belief was that holding the receiver to an aching joint or sore body part could relieve pain or inflammation. Especially in rural areas, where medical access was limited, some believed the telephone could revitalize nerves or stimulate circulation.

3. Run for Your Lives! – Cinema’s First Jump Scare

When motion pictures were first shown to the public in the late 19th century, there were reports of audience members panicking because they believed that the projection was real and posed a threat to their safety.

Among the most notable examples is “The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station” by the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière. Even if the 1896 silent film depicting a train pulling into a station lasted only 50 seconds, it was incredibly lifelike for the early audiences.

See the train that managed to break the cinema’s fourth wall!

Confronted with moving images for the very first time, unlike anything they had seen before, the public had a strong emotional response.

Convinced a real train was about to burst through the screen and plow into them, the overwhelmed crowd screamed, ducked for cover, and even fled the theater in a stampede.

Today, the idea of running from a two-dimensional silent train might sound comical. But put yourself in their shoes: no special effects history, no cinema culture, no sense that a screen could show reality without being real.

The reaction wasn’t about stupidity. It was sensory overload, a shock to the system caused by a medium we now take for granted.

4. Martians Attack – The Night Radio Fooled America

In the early 20th century, radio was magic. A disembodied voice could suddenly fill your living room with music, news, or drama. It was miraculous, mysterious, and for many, unnerving.

Was it divine, or dangerous? Even religious leaders couldn’t agree. Some preachers called it a miracle for spreading the gospel; others saw it as Satan’s speaker system.

By the 1920s, when radio ownership exploded across the U.S., it became a kind of national campfire. But with it came a new problem: people didn’t yet have the tools to separate performance from reality, a fictional broadcast from a genuine news report.

Orson Welles‘ radio adaptation of H.G. Wells‘ “War of the Worlds”, which aired on October 30, 1938, was designed as a realistic portrayal of an alien invasion unfolding in real-time.

Listen to the broadcast that shook America!

Performed by his Mercury Theatre ensemble, Welles’ innovative format was presented as a series of fake news bulletins, complete with breathless on-the-ground reporters, scientific interruptions, and military briefings. To anyone tuning in late – or flipping channels away from the introduction – it sounded terrifyingly real: a Martian invasion in progress.

A mass hysteria spread among those who believed that the United States was under attack by extraterrestrials. The voice on the radio felt authoritative enough to override common sense.

Reports emerged of people hiding in cellars, fleeing their homes, grabbing guns for self-protection, or even dying of a heart attack. Newspapers at the time (bear in mind, they had a motif to discredit radio as a rising competitor for ad dollars) ran sensational headlines about car accidents, blocked highways, and suicides.

The extent of the panic was exaggerated, but it was an early example of fake news about fake news. Ironically, the real story might not be about mass panic attacks, but about how easily a new medium (radio) could be misunderstood, misrepresented, and mythologized, especially when the audience is untrained in skepticism.

5. As Seen on TV – Fiction Getting Real

Television, like every new medium before it, came with side effects. It didn’t just inform or entertain. It shaped perception, made the fictional feel factual, and occasionally inspired real-world action based on made-up plots.

When color TV was introduced in the mid-20th century, many viewers saw it as more than a technical upgrade. They believed color made things more real or accurate, compared to black-and-white.

When “Gilligan’s Island” (1964-1967), the American sitcom about a shipwrecked group stranded on a desert island, aired in color, concerned viewers sent telegrams to the U.S. Coast Guard, asking them to rescue the cast.

Check out if you would confuse the cast for castaways today!

In 1979, a fictional English heavy metal band Spinal Tap appeared in a parody sketch on ABC‘s “The T.V. Show”. Five years later, the group parodied a rock documentary, “This Is Spinal Tap”, which convinced many viewers that it was a real band. The film pioneered the mockumentary format, which audiences were unfamiliar with. Lacking a laugh track, people bought into fabricated interviews and concert footage. Despite the fictional history and discography, after the premiere, the actors released “new albums” and toured as Spinal Tap, once even opening for themselves as The Folksmen, another fictional band.

Watch the selection of the best Spinal Tap moments!

TV’s power to deceive wasn’t limited to the U.S. In the early 1990s, Croatia was swept up in the American soap “Santa Barbara”. While the show didn’t find massive success back home, in post-Yugoslav households, it was a sensation. So much so that when Eden Capwell, a central character played by Marcy Walker, ended up in a wheelchair after a dramatic accident, an elderly woman in the town of Sinj donated money to the local church. The reason? She wanted a Mass said in Eden’s name, praying for her recovery.

Watch when Eden surprises Cruz with “something she was praying for”!

6. Coming Right At You – The 3D Illusion

Competing with the successful TV market, Hollywood introduced the new gimmick – 3D cinema.

The three-dimensional movies exploded in the 1950s, and audiences once again forgot they were watching fiction. Viewers ducked to avoid on-screen spears, shrieked when objects seemed to leap from the frame, and left theaters feeling as if they had been somewhere else.

Decades later, James Cameron’s “Avatar” took immersion to new heights, so much so that some viewers experienced “Post-Avatar Depression”, mourning the fact that Pandora wasn’t real.

Whether it was old-school red-and-blue glasses or modern polarized 3D, the effect was the same: depth created belief.

Today, AI-generated videos use similar tricks (dynamic camera movement, shallow depth of field, lighting effects) to simulate realism and override our critical faculties. Make it move, and people will believe it.

See the trailer for the movie that got its own syndrome!

7. You’ve Got Mail – it’s Nigerian Prince

When the internet first entered people’s homes in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it arrived with a cheerful dial-up tone, a blinking cursor full of promise, and absolutely no sense of danger.

Back then, most excited users approached the web like a digital utopia: a place of free information, instant communication, and infinite curiosity. And into that wide-eyed optimism flooded a tsunami of scams, hoaxes, and copy-paste curses.

Perhaps the most innocent and persistent of these were the chain emails. They warned that if you didn’t forward a message to 10 friends, you’d be cursed with seven years of bad luck. Some were spiritual (“An angel will visit you tonight!”), others menacing (“Delete this and DIE”). But what they all exploited was the same thing AI-generated videos do today: a shortcut past your critical thinking, straight to your fear or hope.

Then came the scams. The most notorious? The 419 email, aka the Nigerian prince fraud. “Dearest Friend”, it would begin, in a suspiciously flowery tone. “I am a prince in need of help transferring $50 million…” The grammar was poor. The story made no sense. But thousands, even millions, clicked, replied, and wired away savings. The medium felt trustworthy. After all, it arrived in your inbox, addressed personally. How could it be fake?

The early web was a scammer’s playground and an honest user’s booby trap. Phishing links disguised as promotions, virus-ridden .exe files downloaded with a single click, and pop-ups declaring “YOU’VE WON!” while quietly hijacking your browser – all succeeded not because people were stupid, but because they were naive. The rules weren’t clear yet. We believed what we saw. We clicked before we thought.

And we still do it, on social media, clicking on links as soon as our friends drop a DM with a “request for help”.

Remember those legal-sounding Facebook statuses declaring “I do not give Facebook permission to use my photos”? Or the annual panic post about a new privacy policy, which users believed could be invalidated by copy-pasting a bold paragraph into their timeline? That’s not how contracts work. But millions shared those statuses, only self-identifying as susceptible fraud targets.

We’ve moved from “forward this to avoid a curse” to “watch this dolphin rescue a baby zebra from a tsunami”. But the formula hasn’t changed.

Check out how thousands of people lost money thinking they participated in lost luggage sales advertised on Facebook!

8. The New Era of Digital Deception – From Photoshop to Deepfakes

Photoshop arrived in the late 1980s, but the public had already lived through manipulated photographs – from Abraham Lincoln‘s head placed on John Calhoun’s body for the President’s most iconic portrait to Stalin airbrushing rivals out of existence.

Photoshop democratized deception. Suddenly, anyone with a mouse and patience could edit reality, and make it beautiful, dangerous, or just fake.

With manipulation getting more subtle and results more polished, audiences started trusting the perfect over the possible. For instance, retouching of models’ appearances in fashion journals stimulated a whole range of eating disorders among teenagers, who believed the deception.

Remember the viral photo of a shark leaping toward a helicopter? Or the widely circulated image of “Mars Spectacular” supposedly appearing as large as the Moon on August 27? Both were fake – Photoshop creations passed around as scientific marvels or National Geographic-style moments. Yet millions believed.

Then came deepfakes, and things got weird. In 2017, a Reddit user released a video showing celebrities’ faces swapped into porn. Not just a static edit, but a moving, blinking, speaking face, artificially generated, frighteningly realistic. Within months, Barack Obama was delivering words he never said. Then we got Tom Cruise doing TikTok magic tricks. Donald Trump got arrested. Pope Francis rocked a Balenciaga puffer coat.

Watch coin magic performed by one and NOT only Tom Cruise!

@deeptomcruise

I love magic!

♬ original sound – Miles Fisher

Unlike Photoshop, which was still rooted in manual skill, deepfakes were powered by AI, and they were getting better by the week. Audio could be cloned. Mouths could be synced. Entire videos could be fabricated from scratch, in minutes.

And it resulted in an accidental belief. People shared, liked, reposted, laughed, and panicked. Not because they were foolish, but because we’re all conditioned to believe what we see, especially when it moves.

Psychology of believing fake content

If all this sounds like a parade of facepalms, it’s worth pausing to remember: falling for fakes isn’t stupidity. It’s psychology.

Humans are wired to trust what they see and hear, especially when it mimics the physical world. This makes evolutionary sense. For most of human history, our eyes and ears were reliable sensors. If you saw a tiger, it was a tiger. If you heard thunder, a storm was coming.

But modern media exploits these same instincts with manufactured visuals, hyperreal audio, and emotionally loaded narratives that hijack our attention and bypass critical filters.

Psychologists have identified several key reasons we keep falling for fabricated content:

Cognitive ease: If something is fluently presented (clear, high-res, emotionally engaging), our brains are more likely to accept it as true.

Confirmation bias: We believe what aligns with our existing beliefs or hopes, whether it’s a diving dog or a politician’s “leaked tape”.

Emotional hijacking: Viral content often evokes outrage, awe, cuteness, or fear, all of which impair critical thinking and boost shareability.

Authority by aesthetics: If a video looks professionally produced, we’re more likely to trust it, regardless of its source.

Social proof: If thousands of others are liking, sharing, or commenting with wonder or tears, we’re more likely to join in than question. Virality reinforces belief, belief produces virality – it’s a loop!

And when the pace of technological change outstrips our capacity to adapt, we’re left running on instincts evolved for the savannah, not synthetic images of cats doing Olympic backflips.

Why We Fall for AI-Generated Videos – Conclusion

We’ve come a long way from fleeing Lumière’s oncoming train or forwarding chain emails to avoid seven years of bad luck. And yet, every time a new technology emerges (photography, radio, Photoshop, AI), humanity briefly forgets how to think. We reset the learning curve. We marvel, share, and fall for it. History repeats itself.

That’s not a failure of intelligence. It’s a side effect of being human, a recurring glitch in our collective operating system.

Today it’s Cat Olympics and dogs in scuba gear. Tomorrow, it might be political speeches and fake eyewitness footage

Our minds are meaning-making machines. We crave stories, we trust our senses, and we lean on emotional cues to navigate a chaotic world. But in the age of AI, our senses can be fooled faster than we can fact-check, and emotion can be engineered with terrifying ease.

Today it’s Cat Olympics and dogs in scuba gear. Tomorrow, it might be political speeches, fake eyewitness footage, or loved ones’ voices asking us to wire them some money.

Every generation has had its “this technology is going to ruin us” moment, and much of it echoes the same underlying anxieties: loss of control, blurred boundaries, and machines meddling in roles once seen as sacred.

We don’t need to become cynical robots. But we do need to learn how to pause before we believe, and doubt before we share.

Until we can say: a critical thinker is born every minute.

Did you ever fall for AI-generated videos?
Share your comments below, and pin this article for later!

The post Cat Olympics & Magical Tiny Houses: Why We Fall for AI-Generated Videos appeared first on Pipeaway.

Hi from Hallstatt!

Yep, that’s the fairytale place I stopped in on my ride from Switzerland to Croatia.

The off-highway journey through Austria seemed much more scenic than the one I usually take through Italy (Milan–Trieste), I must say. Not just because of Hallstatt, as that’s the most famous village in the northern Austrian Alps. Practically, the entire route between Salzburg and Wolfsberg is dotted with charming villages and extraordinary natural sites that please the senses: from flower-covered meadows to refreshing mountain streams.

There are quite a few lakes one could stop by, too. My pick was Lake Hallstatt, a lake so clear and deep that it became a famous scuba diving spot. This time, I wasn’t looking for submerged shipwrecks and ancient trees, but you might!

I mostly enjoyed Hallstätter See‘s calming vistas that induce a meditative state of mind. Even when I lifted my drone to see the lake from the swan’s perspective, I was so immersed in the bigger picture that I failed to notice a couple of cows wading through the lake shallows – you can briefly see them in the bottom left corner of my YouTube video on 01:29.

Lake temperature is 16°C at the moment, still below the June average. But in the next 10 days, it will warm up and, with the beginning of July, the swimming season will officially open.

So we’ll be able to enjoy dipping our hooves as well.

Until then, go off-road and off-frame! You never know when an unexpected detail could become your main reward.

Have a refreshing week!

Ivan Kralj        
Pipeaway.com

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning if you click on them and make a purchase, Pipeaway may make a small commission, at no additional cost to you. Thank you for supporting our work!

The post 🐄 Swan’s-Eye View of Cow Cameos – Pipeaway Newsletter #173 appeared first on Pipeaway.