If you’re arrested in America for a minor charge — say, for speeding or loitering — the punishment from the legal system might end up being the least of your worries. You might wake up a few months later and see your arrest, filmed through a police body camera, with a million views on TikTok or YouTube. A few days later, it might have 5 million views, or 20 million. Your face would be next to dozens of other faces of the recently arrested, all on monetized, for-profit social media channels. And it would be almost impossible to get the videos taken down.

Like so much of the algorithm-driven internet, this particular subsection can be easy to miss. But it’s massive. A popular YouTube channel like Code Blue Cam averages over 10 million views a video, and has totaled more than a billion acros

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