This year began on a disturbing note with videos of the mass molestation of women by unruly New Year revellers on the streets of Bengaluru, an incident that triggered widespread outrage. At around the same time, a video popped up in Delhi too, leaving the police perplexed and the public irate. In this YouTube video, a young man went around the city kissing women in public places before running away. The kiss-and-run was uploaded by a YouTuber who had been sharing such content on the video-sharing platform under the tag Crazy Sumit for the last two years or so.
On January 10, the Delhi Police registered a case of outraging the modesty of women and publishing obscene material in the electronic form, and handed the investigation to the crime branch. The real twist came after Sumit Verma, alias Crazy Sumit, was detained for interrogation on January 13.
Verma, a 21-year-old college student from Gurgaon in the National Capital Region, claimed he had shot the video with the consent of the women seen in it. Later, three women questioned by the crime branch testified in his favour. In a fix now on how to proceed with the investigation, the police have sought legal opinion. “We had flagged 12 other YouTube pranksters who have uploaded similar content [technically called mature content] but now we are mulling what action to take next,” said an official in the Delhi Police’s cyber cell.
Prank videos of the kind Crazy Sumit uploaded broadly come under the category of social experiment videos, which have been prevalent in the West for decades now. But to what level are they staged or scripted, and where does the thin line between the permissible and the obscene exist on a platform that is easily accessible to people of all religions, communities, cultures, genders and race?
YouTube has witnessed a global emergence of content creators who film and upload unusual experiments, such as smoking and getting high on marijuana – a report in The Guardian tagged them WeedTubers. The trend has caught on in India, where there is a growing audience for such social experiment videos that are largely influenced by the West. Crazy Sumit’s YouTube channel, for instance, is reported to have 150,000 followers.
The experimenters
“When it comes to social experiments, there are two broad categories of videos,” said Rahul Bhattacharya, founder of the Quick Reaction Team that has produced several such videos. “One is in the form of an interview and the other is a prank. When it comes to pranks, over 95% of the acts are done with consent and many a time, they involve actors. But there are guidelines that one must adhere to, especially when dealing with mature content, which requires a lot of moderation and filtration.”
The Quick Reaction Team is one of six YouTube ambassadors in India who, apart from producing such videos, are entrusted with the task of connecting with small content creators and counselling them on the content they tend to upload. “Individuals and groups who produce universally acceptable content and cross the mark of 50,000 subscribers are often approached by partner managers offering them perks for regular contribution,” Bhattacharya explained. “And the system has worked well so far, barring exceptional cases like that of Crazy Sumit.”
The Quick Reaction Team, and a few others like them, mostly use the interview method while dealing with mature subjects such as menstruation, sex and lifestyle choices that come with stigmas attached. But there are over a dozen other popular creators (all with over 50,000 subscribers) that rely mostly on pranks and, more often than not, cross the line. When the videos of one such creator are accessed on YouTube, it paves the way for many others to also gain an audience as their content makes it to the list of suggested videos on the channel’s side panel.
The success of such videos has resulted in a spurt in prankster YouTubers in Delhi, who go around Connaught Place, a popular shopping district, and the Delhi University campus asking people to identify penis enlargement pumps, throwing used condoms at passers-by, playing truth-or-dare games that usually involve kissing as punishment, and passing remarks on human genitalia.
Growing trend
“While a few popular channels that produce universally accepted content today actually became popular through prank videos in their initial days, for most, it has worked the other way round – they start to get desperate when their initial experiments [probably decent in nature] don’t work out well in terms of views, likes and subscriptions,” Bhattacharya said without naming any content creator.
He added that experimental videos – both in interview and prank form – are not a new phenomenon; they have been around for a while but gained visibility in the last two years or so, probably because the system of producing them is more organised now. “Also, the nature of the content has a direct correlation with the nature of advertisements and sponsorships that the creators get,” he said.
A YouTuber in Delhi, who did not want to be identified, said the Crazy Sumit incident and videos on the same line are the result of competition. “Sumit had terrible luck because his kiss-and-run video emerged at a time when there was ongoing outrage over the mass molestation issue in Bengaluru,” he said.
He also explained that making prank videos was a risky prospect, calling the manner in which content creators film inside shopping malls and other private property guerrilla-like. “There is high risk because one can be charged with criminal trespass in such cases,” he said. “That is why YouTubers in Delhi prefer shooting in and around Connaught Place, where they get a good mix of crowd without having to take the risk. But now, after the Sumit episode, even shooting at Connaught Place has become quite risky.”
Kislay Chaudhary, an information technology consultant to police forces in several states and Union territories, including Delhi, said that the case of Crazy Sumit was not the only one in which charges of obscenity under the Information Technology Act could be pressed. However, he said that doing so was usually tricky as it was often difficult to figure out which of the videos were shot with consent.
During their investigation into the Crazy Sumit video, the Delhi Police have come across a network of YouTubers and actors who are part of several such projects. In fact, it was one of these YouTubers, who owns a photo studio in Gurgaon, who led the police to Sumit Verma, who was in hiding.
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