Instead of resorting to Netflix or Hulu, I tend to go straight to YouTube on my TV for when I decide to watch something. YouTube has unlimited possibilities (within reason) on what to watch, but a common trope is reacting to other people’s content. Ideally, a person should make transformative content with these reaction videos by giving enough meaningful commentary to the video. The idea of transformative content constitutes fair use on a website like YouTube.
Why is this relevant now? Recently, ReactGate was revitalized where certain creators across video platforms were being called out for not transforming their content enough and just watching other creators’ videos on their videos or streams. This is an issue because the original creator of these videos would not receive revenue from their video if a big streamer, like xQc, watched it on their stream and didn’t add meaningful commentary. It would be just reuploading the original video but on a different account, which xQc has been frequently called out on by the likes of H3H3 and other streamers.
ReactGate has been an ongoing topic, but has been somewhat revitalized recently when Jacksfilms, real name John “Jack” Douglass, called out SSSniperWolf, real name Alia Shelesh. These two are both big YouTubers, being prominent for at least 10 years. Jacksfilms called out SSSniperWolf because most of her content is her doing non-transformative reactions to videos found on the internet, sometimes not even saying anything. Douglass would call her out on his channel, even making a third channel later called JJJacksfilms dedicated to calling out Shelesh. Douglass has been going on this for at least year, and a thing that spurred him on more recently is that YouTube made Shelesh a Keynote speaker at VidCon this past year, despite her stealing a large number of her content from other creators.
Apparently Shelesh had enough on October 13th when she decided to dox Douglass. Doxxing is harmfully revealing private information about someone. This can be social security number, phone number, and in this case – a picture of Douglass’ house on a now deleted Instagram story. Shelesh claims to have found his address on the internet and drove over to his house while he was doing a livestream and says she wanted to “talk like adults” with him. She also asserts that Douglass was interfering with her revenue stream and that she had “no ill intentions” when she posted the pic. Douglass called for YouTube to do something about it in a video released the next day. To really rub salt into the wound, Shelesh and her sister joked about it on her Instagram story the next day.
YouTube…unsurprisingly did not respond well by making a joke out of it on October 18th by posting on their X account “would it be too meta to do a reaction video to a reaction video [sic]” before doing anything. They then announced that Shelesh received a temporary monetization suspension but while also blaming Douglass. Additionally, Shelesh posted an apology on her X account on the 20th, however many have called her out because it reads like something that was generated using ChatGPT, a free AI chatbot. She has also continued to post videos, making many believe that her apology was empty and that she hasn’t learned from her actions. Given these two responses, people aren’t optimistic that things will change.
Nothing has happened in the week since, leaving many disappointed that YouTube did not remove SSSniperWolf from their platform. They did not disclose the length of the suspension, but that’s a drop in the bucket for a large creator such as her. The implications of this situation has the potential to be great as it can transform react content online. Hopefully this informed readers of this situation and will help by adding more eyes on the situation so that positive change can happen.