SILICON VALLEY – After numerous complaints from British and American officials, YouTube have removed hundreds of videos used to “rickroll” unsuspecting viewers from its site.
The bait and switch meme featuring Rick Astley has been used to cause embarrassment ‘on a grand scale’ for years, resulting in a chorus of upset internet users demanding the material and all it’s spin offs be removed from the video sharing site.
The move comes after authorities in US, UK and Dubai were all victim to a concerted Rickrolling campaign which saw them Rickrolled as much as 25 times in a single day through various forms of electronic correspondence, leading to Mr Astley being labelled “one annoying son of a bitch.” by an American IT manager.
‘Please, make it stop’
UK Security minister Baroness Neville-Jones pressed for the videos to be removed after being Rickrolled last Saturday and a New York congressman, Anthony Weiner, sent YouTube a letter listing the hundreds of Rickroll links sent to him over two years when he thought he was open emails linking to videos of D-list celebrity nipple slips.
The requests took on greater urgency after two ‘high ranking’ senators were Rickrolled with the version featuring Ronald MacDonald. The prime suspects are thought to be YouTube members with possible links to 4Chan.
Baroness Neville-Jones also expressed her deep concern over websites that encouraged homegrown Rickrolling efforts, believing it had become “far too easy for someone to go onto the internet and learn to make these dangerously annoying memes from their bedroom.”
Freedom of pranking
Born in America, Astley’s work has been linked to dorm rooms across the country, several fraudulent Christmas party emails, and 65 fake birthday invites in New York alone. As a result, he is now on a CIA hit list authorised by President Barack Obama.
Last month, investigators reported finding more than 700 videos used in Rickrolling attack. The clips had garnered more than 3.5m hits in a sure sign that they were being actively used to waste 10 seconds of people’s lives they would never get back.
Victoria Grand, a YouTube spokeswoman said the company had tried to balance the freedom of pwning noobs with averting the calls to violence usually heard in response, but now admits a harder line is needed. “These are difficult issues,” she wrote, “I mean, it was super funny at one point but it’s clearly peaked so I think we’re justified in removing the offending content now.”
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