Why are so many videos online backwards?

Becaue they’re stolen.

Taking a selfie with a phone is like looking at yourself in a mirror: It will appear backwards. Many phones will let you flip such an image after the fact, but the default mirror-image effect is deliberate: If the flipping were active while taking the picture, the hand manipulations required to recenter the image would be counter-intuitive.

My phone shows a mirror view in the screen in selfie mode, but the recorded footage and photos are not mirrored (there’s probably a setting to mirror the actual footage, but the default is normal, right-way around video that obviously preserves things like text appearing in the footage).

But if it’s not a vlog or something, the footage is typically reversed as an attempt to evade copyright detection. I would say this is the majority reason, simply because the majority of online video is now not original.

I used to take slides with my film camera. If I loaded them in the projector the wrong way around, I’d get mirror images.

It’s certainly an attempt to get around the copyright-detection bots. I rather doubt it actually works, though: If the video’s still up, it’s just because the bot hasn’t gotten around to noticing it yet.

I agree. It is trivial for the automated systems to detect a mirrored video.

It probably worked for a couple months way back when this was new but it is not worth the effort today.

Some video players give you a “flip the video” option.

In the past, I’ve seen stolen audiobooks on YouTube that had both silent breaks and screechy music breaks. Not sure how long that lasted.

I was looking at one recently about bridges, actual footage of the bridge showed the correct driving side, but “drone” shots showed the opposite. The latter therefore seemingly AI slop, but really slack effort if so.