385. A warning or a honey trap?

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I have a confession to make. I ran a little experiment on you a few weeks ago. I titled Twitteretter 357 ‘Warning. Sex, nudity and sexual violence’. Why am I telling you this? My Youtube statistics tell me that this has been, by a large margin, my most watched video in the last month. This is a bit embarrassing for my audience, I think. Clearly, the warning so widely used by Netflix and others seems to have the opposite effect to its purported purpose, attracting viewers as bees to honey, rather than keeping them away. This may to a point explain the profligacy with which these warnings are used by the media industry. There is no point, I guess, on acting shocked on this discovery, it is actually what we expected. I have observed, for as long as I have been around, that these subjects fascinate humans in a way in which more interesting subjects do not. Just imagine the effect of a message reading ‘Warning, discussions on philosophy, theology, socioeconomics and behavioural psychology’

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Location: Hereford, UK

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