This is Getting Out of Control

[00:00:00]All right. So, I really didn't want to make this video. I considered doing it five months ago, but I had thought things had settled down a bit and then more recently things have ramped up and are kind of completely out of control.

[00:00:13]So, I felt the need to at least address it to give you the truth of what's happening and hopefully it can provide some insight, maybe some education on this entire crazy situation. So, around 6 months ago, people started sending me this video right here. Maybe some of you have come across something like this.

[00:00:31]There's a lot of them now. Maybe you haven't seen it. So, I'm just going to play the beginning of it so you can get an idea of what's going on.

[00:00:38]>> An Oregon man was convicted and sent to jail for collecting and using rainwater on his own property, sued by the state for theft. Rancher Gary Harrington built three large reservoirs on his own land to collect rainwater and snow melt. He claimed the water was primarily for fire protection reserves and for providing water to wildlife, but the state called it theft and prosecuted Gary.

[00:01:00]>> So, we'll get into more of the details of this video and the other similar videos in a second, but there are so many things wrong with this video.

[00:01:08]First, let's get the obvious out of the way. I am not Gary Harrington. I am Mike Greenfield. But these videos are using stolen footage from my videos of me legally collecting rainwater on my property while the narration is talking about Gary Harrington going to jail.

[00:01:23]>> Rainwater is a public resource and collecting it without permission is illegal.

[00:01:29]>> In Oregon, a man was convicted [music] and sentenced to jail for collecting and using rainwater on his own land. The state government charged him with theft.

[00:01:35]Rancher Gary Harrington built three large reservoirs on his property [music] to collect rainwater and snow melt. In the end, Harrington was convicted on multiple charges, [music] including the illegal use of state water resources. He was sentenced to 30 days in [music] jail and fined more than $15,000.

[00:01:50]>> So, obviously, if you're just scrolling along in your phone and you've never seen one of my videos, you don't know who I am. Your immediate reaction might be to associate me with this guy, Gary Harrington, who went to jail. Which is why around five months ago when these videos started popping up, I started getting private messages from people who either just wanted to inform me that these videos were out there, people who knew who I was, but there were definitely some people that were rather confused and wanted more information on the situation and like were concerned that I went to jail. So, this is clearly defamation because I am obviously not this guy, Gary Harrington. But that is just one annoying part of these videos.

[00:02:26]What's really twisted is how deceptive the actual story is. It's completely misleading. The whole reason these videos have gone so viral is because of the headline. You're scrolling through, you hear, "Man goes to jail for collecting rainwater." Your initial thought is like, "Wait a minute. How could he go to jail for just collecting a free resource?" And if you check out the comments on these videos, there are thousands and thousands of people interacting with these videos. At this point, it's like out of control.

[00:02:53]Everything is, "America's the worst.

[00:02:55]Government's taking our rights. I'm leaving this piece of country. judge should go to jail. It just goes on and on like it is out of control. And at this point, we're aware how social media algorithms work. Triggering outrage, of course, is one of the strongest emotions for driving engagement online. When people are really pissed off, they're much more likely to engage with the content. They're going to comment in.

[00:03:17]They might argue and fight in the comments. They're going to share with other people. And of course, these algorithms don't actually give a if it's true or not. All they care about is the engagement. more people watching the videos, which means more people on their platforms, which means they can sell more ads. Now, right away, those initial videos that were being messaged to me, some of them went super viral, like 5 million plus views, which was annoying, but I figured things would just kind of fade away over time. But there just seems to be something specific about this story that triggers so much outrage that just continues the cycle just like more reposting, more people copying the video that it's just spread like wildfire. I mean, at this point, if you just type in rainwater jail on Instagram, it's an endless scroll of these videos. And some are just reposts.

[00:04:06]They get a smaller amount of views, but there are tons of these videos that have millions and millions of views and shares. And that's just Instagram.

[00:04:13]That's the only platform outside of YouTube that I engage with. I haven't even checked Tik Tok or Facebook. And knowing like the misinformation hub of those platforms, I imagine it's probably worse over there. So, let's actually talk about the most egregious part of these videos, which is the misinformation going on. So, first of all, this happened over 15 years ago.

[00:04:32]So, it's strange that it just is resurfacing right now. And this guy Gary Harrington, which I don't know if there's actually a picture of him on the internet, which I think is the reason why people are just putting my face on these videos. They need some visual evidence. So they're like, "Oh, this guy collects rain water. Let's pop him on there." So Gary was fined $1,500 and sentenced to jail for 30 days. That part of the story actually is true. What's not true is why he got fined and went to jail. So this guy, Gary Harrington, owned a 170 acre property in Oregon. And on that property, he built three large earthn dams across a natural drainage channel. Some of these dams apparently being up to 15 ft tall. And essentially, he was creating these seasonal streams.

[00:05:16]So these streams would capture rainwater and snow melt, funneling the water into three large reservoirs on his property that held around 13 million gallons of water. Now, that's roughly the equivalent of 20 Olympic size swimming pools. And if you compare that to this 1,000galon rain barrel I used to collect water on my roof, you can see this is a slightly different scale we're talking about. Now, the dispute wasn't simply about collecting rain water. It was about water rights. Gary believed he didn't need permits because he argued that the reservoirs only collected rainwater and snow melt from his property. But Oregon officials disagreed, saying the dams intercepted water that would have naturally flowed into protected waterways, meaning state water rights and permits were required.

[00:05:58]Now, Gary actually applied for permits and he initially received approval for two of them, but just a couple months later, the state revoked these approvals after determining his property was part of the Big B Creek wershed. Now, Gary went back and forth with the courts for over 10 years. And after multiple court losses and repeatedly refusing to comply with court orders by continuing to refill these reservoirs on his property, it seemed that the courts were just straight fed up with Gary. And they imposed a harsher penalty of this $1,500 fine and 30 days in jail, which now you understand is a much different situation than man goes to jail for, say, collecting rain water in barrels off his roof. And apparently that man is me. So, when this first started happening a few months ago, I would just send a message to the people making the videos or posting the videos telling them to take it down and most of them would take it down immediately. But over the last month or two, I started getting a lot more private messages about this because things were just like continuing to spread and go viral and ramp up to the point where like it's out of control. I can't actually message all of these people because I would be wasting basically all day doing that. It would be like a full-time job. Now, the first type of content comes from these AI generated content pages. Just complete AI slot taking up space on the internet trying to, I guess, farm some views. They find a story, they have AI narrate it, they grab obviously stolen footage from somewhere else on the internet. They throw it together. Boom.

[00:07:24]You hope it goes viral, I guess. So, there's a lot of that going on. The second type of video is just as dumb.

[00:07:30]It's people reacting to these videos.

[00:07:32]And I use the word reacting very loosely because they aren't actually adding any commentary at all. They're literally just sitting there on screen and the video is playing.

[00:07:42]>> An Oregon man was convicted and sentenced to jail for collecting and using rainwater on his own property.

[00:07:50]>> Rancher Gary Harrington built >> an Oregon man was jailed for collecting rainwater on his own property. And meanwhile, all the people in the files aren't being held accountable.

[00:07:58]>> Always trust your government. Always.

[00:07:59]And since I guess they have more of a conservative audience, this apparently gets views. And some of these reaction videos have millions and millions of views. Now, another thing that is annoying about these videos is that I do think they are scaring people away from collecting rainwater, at least in the US since Oregon, of course, is in the US.

[00:08:20]And I've had to educate myself on this because rainwater collection is something that I love doing. It's become one of my favorite things to do in the whole homesteading ecosystem. Like the other day, we had huge storms. We got, I think, five or six inches of rain. And I'm sitting here just so excited that my rain tanks are filling up after like a long dry spell because I can use that beautiful non-treated rain water to water all of my plants, which they absolutely love because there's no chlorine in it like the municipal water being much better for the soil biology.

[00:08:54]And in almost every single state, it is perfectly legal to collect rain water from your roof and funnel it into some type of barrel. Some people filter that rain water and they use it in their house as drinking water or just running water for their showers or sinks. I personally just use it for my plants.

[00:09:10]And if collecting rain water is something you're interested in, you do want to check with your local regulations because although it is legal in every state to do it, some states regulate how much you can actually collect. Colorado probably being the best known example, being part of a much larger western water right system. Since water is more scarce in this part of the country, they want to make sure most of that water is going directly into the ground. So, they regulate how much you can actually capture from your roof.

[00:09:36]Now, personally, I'm comfortable with my image online. I've been creating videos on YouTube and different social media platforms for over a decade now. If you've watched my videos, you know I'm not Gary Harrington. And thank you for anyone if you are watching this video that has gone into the comments to kind of clear up this story. That has definitely helped. I I feel like more recently I've been seeing people commenting in like you got to fact check this story. But in the beginning it was just pure outrage. And still most of it is outrage in the comments. Maybe there's like one comment in there stating that this is a misleading story.

[00:10:11]But this whole experience in general, I think just represents a much bigger trend and issue that's happening with digital content right now. It has just gotten so easy to generate AI content and throw it out there in the interweb.

[00:10:26]You grab a story, you steal other people's content without their permission, you post it, and you just hope it goes viral. And most of this is happening with short form content cuz it's just so easy to produce a 30-cond or 1 minute video. But I am starting to see it kind of enter into the world of long- form videos, which is a huge bummer. Now, you also see with the virality of a video like this, how effective the algorithms actually are at creating these outrage echo chambers on the internet. There are millions of people seeing these videos. They don't question the validity of the video for a second. They just get pissed off. They comment in and that algorithm just pumps it out to more people. And the biggest problem with all that because humans are always going to be able to take advantage of human psychology and figure out how to profit off of it or figure out how to get views off of it. So, I really think this comes down to the actual platforms. And it doesn't seem like the platforms are doing very much to stop this type of content. It's clearly so easy for these people to create misleading content that's full of copyright infringement and the platforms aren't doing a damn thing. At least that I can see where this clearly could happen to anyone. I'm just one example.

[00:11:41]I think um what was it? This guy Rhett Shaw who has a guitar YouTube channel and this is an example of long form video where an AI channel was just completely ripping off his content in a few different ways. So, I would imagine this type of problem is going to get much worse before it gets better, if it ever gets better. I've been making videos on the internet for woo over a decade now. And at least on YouTube, I feel like they've always done a pretty good job reacting to some type of issue on the platform. Definitely not perfect, but they've kept it as a healthy enough ecosystem where I am excited to continue to make videos on there. And that's not an easy job when you just have millions of people posting every day. But it needs to be done. As technology changes and evolves, there's always going to be this type of that shows up and it needs to be met with more regulations or you have an unhealthy environment that you don't want to be on. I guess the moral of the story is don't believe every headline you see on the