But #NoMoreCRAPtions highlights how impressive advances in assistive technologies such as automatic captioning can obscure these technologies’ imperfections. She’s hardly a techno-skeptic: Like many people who identify as deaf or Deaf ( deaf describes a medical condition Deaf denotes a cultural identity), she has embraced social media to connect with others in her community. In hundreds of videos, tweets, messages, and handwritten letters, Poynter has urged creators to write their own captions or employ professionals to help get the job done right.

Take Jimmy Kimmel Live’s Guillermo Rodriguez knocking back a shot of maple syrup and cheering “Old Anna!” (He’s actually saying “O Canada!”) Or the influencer Emma Chamberlain declaring that once her plane lands, “I’ll be embarrassed.” (She’s saying “I’ll be in Paris.”) One video from Playlist Live rendered “Check out their booth” as “Check out their boobies.”

In her videos, she asks YouTubers to ditch the automatic captions that YouTube itself generates, which are notorious for delivering run-on sentences studded with nonsensical or occasionally obscene phrases.

Since 2015, Poynter, a deaf 28-year-old, has built her following around a campaign she calls #NoMoreCRAPtions. But she also arrived with a message for her fellow internet celebrities: Your video captions are terrible. Poynter, whose own YouTube channel has more than 85,000 subscribers, was invited to speak as part of a panel on mental health. The event, Playlist Live, boasted a roster of performers who had collectively racked up billions of views: a 16-year-old who put elastic bands around a pumpkin until it exploded, the twins who played the evil stepsisters on Jane the Virgin, a guy who pranked people from inside a snowman suit.

In March, Rikki Poynter flew to Orlando for a YouTuber convention.

Youtube video captions