TikTok has become, on its own merits, the best platform for any video to go viral, thanks to the recommendation algorithm and how easy it is to share all the content that is published on this social network. However, it has not always been so. Until TikTok entered the league of video platforms, YouTube was the only option available on the market and Instagram Reels have been added. If we talk about cursed videos, we have to talk about 1444, one of the last viral videos to hit YouTube.
In 2019, many were the posts on social networks that talked about the video called 1444, in which a young man ends his life using a shotgun and where no additional information was shown to prevent the YouTube algorithm from automatically removing it, although finally it was like that due to the repercussion it had on social networks.
The young man who appears in the video was Gleb Korablev, an 18-year-old student who, before pulling the trigger, says a few words in Russian as a farewell. According to a Reddit thread, this video began to be shared on Dark Web forums (not to be confused with the Deep Web) until it finally made the leap to the open internet through YouTube. If we currently search for the video on YouTube, we can see a large number of videos whose thumbnail is an image of this young man before or during the process.
However, these videos do not really offer the video, they are just looking for one more view to add to the ones they already have and some of these troll videos accumulate several million views. YouTube analyzes the content of the videos that are shared on its platform, so today it is impossible to find it on this Google platform.
The only way to access this video is to look for a link that invites us to download it, which is a security problem for the user, since it can be any malicious file hidden under a file that uses a video extension and that can not always be detected by our antivirus, regardless of which one we are using.
When this video went viral, I had the opportunity to see it and, from the beginning, it didn’t seem like it was real, giving me the impression that it was a montage, since there were certain inconsistencies that invited me to consider the veracity of this. If we take into account that thanks to Artificial Intelligence we can create and manipulate any type of image and video, it should not surprise us that it is just a montage.
Is it a cursed video? It is a video, without more, in which the aforementioned event is shown. However, some users have taken advantage of it to invite users who see it to share the date on which they have seen it to avoid a supposed curse that they have pulled out of their sleeve.
