One year ago, I made an alternate cut of the movie American Sniper. In my version, Bradley Cooper’s character, Chris Kyle, casually shoots people while talking on the phone with his wife. At the advice of a friend, I gave the video a title with grammatical case issues and an intentional misspelling, so people might mistake it for a video uploaded by a fan of American Sniper.

This video is clearly not a scene from American Sniper. In the video, Cooper’s character casually shoots some people — including a child — while talking dirty to his wife. And, if I’m being honest, the editing is crap. No one should be duped by this.

In fact, some very astute YouTubers noticed that the clip was edited.

All great points. Unfortunately, some less astute people at Warner Brothers bought ad space on the video.

The advertisement links to an official trailer for American Sniper on the Warner Brothers Video On Demand YouTube Channel, where you can purchase the movie (IN STANDARD DEF 😲) for $6.99.

Let’s chalk this one up to an algorithm. Warner Brothers has some opportunistic script running around YouTube, buying ads on American Sniper fan videos. It’s funny that they’re advertising on this video, but the decision to do so was probably not made by a human person.

So, guess what happened next. A human person went and used the video in a real news story!!

Last week, Business Insider linked to the video in their article, “6 movie scenes that show what military families go through.” I repeat, Business Insider used an obviously fake, badly edited video where a person casually shoots people while talking dirty to his wife as an example of “what military families go through.”

Link to the internet archive for when Business Insider decides to take the story down.

This is exactly why I make stupid bullshit and put it on the Internet. For every Potato Salad, there are going to be dozens of Jet Skis. For every tweet that gets a hundred retweets, there are hundreds more that no one cares about. It can be really lonely. But all of the loneliness is worth it when a major media company earnestly links to your badly edited video of an American hero apathetically bullseying enemy combatants while having phone sex with his wife. Thank you, Warner Brothers and Business Insider, for being less perceptive than most YouTube commenters, and for making my day.