> “If a creator’s off-platform behavior harms our users, employees or ecosystem, we take action to protect the community,” the spokeswoman said.
Putting aside the validity of the accusations—let's say he did everything he's accused of, for the sake of argument—is Youtube alleging that he assaulted Youtube employees, app developers who use the Youtube ecosystem, or Youtube users? I assume the latter. But the thing is, a majority of people on Earth are Youtube users, so what the heck does that even mean?
I have no dog in this fight, Russell Brand's fate is not of interest to me. I'm just wondering about the argument they are making, and how broad it seems. If any alleged crime takes place wherein the victim has watched at least one Youtube video at some point in their life, and the perpetrator has a monetized Youtube channel, will Youtube's policy be to step in and protect the victim? For example, if I am YT creator and I punch someone in a bar, and that someone has a Youtube subscription, does Youtube step in? That feels like the kind of policy that cannot be faithfully and objectively executed, which makes it a bad policy and a potential legal vulnerability for Youtube.
I don't think it matters if the other person has a YT subscription. If you create videos about, say, beekeeping and you get in a random bar fight, no, probably not. IF you're some sort of 'influencer' and your public persona is all about being a tough-talking badass, such that your getting into a bar fight makes you the Main character in the entertainment/gossip pages for several days, then they might dump you because they don't want next weeks story to be 'YouTube subsidizes karaterobot's hard-drinking combat LARP.'
It's not a balanced appraisal of facts and harms and injury allocation like in a tort lawsuit; more a seat-of-the-pants executive judgement call on 'does hanging out with this guy commercially make us look bad?' If the answer is yes, then you suddenly no longer have a commercial relationship. It's similar to the 'morals clauses' in the contracts of TV and movie stars, but with the difference that tech firms basically set contractual terms unilaterally and the network effects are so strong that that no individual performer has any kind of leverage to request anything different.
It's worth understanding that the incredible concentration of corporate power on digital platforms is due to a mix of technological moats, the first-mover advantage of preferential attachment, and a philosophical shift away from breaking up monopolies, on the theory that large entities often deliver greater consumer benefits than a competitive market place, a viewpoint famously summarized here: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
The comparison to 'morals clauses' is apt: it was used mostly to force Christian, anti-Communist, and later pro-China stances on actors lest they harm the 'reputation' of the studio.
> But the thing is, a majority of people on Earth are Youtube users, so what the heck does that even mean?
This is beside the point, but I want to bring it up because I think it's important to remember we live in a bubble.
A majority of people on earth are not Youtube users. Only ~60% of the world's population uses the internet[1], and of those, I'd assume a significant portion lack the bandwidth to stream video. Also, Youtube is blocked in China.
I doubt "we take action to protect the community" has a clear legal definition. Their "community" could be people without an internet connection too (e.g. everyone in Los Angeles because they have an office there).
Since this is obviously not about their "community" but about protecting the brand, I doubt they have put much thought into defining any of the terms in the statement.
YouTube doesn't want to be demonetized by advertisers, so they are demonetizing Brand. It's basic reputation management / income stream protection. Brand is free to go elsewhere or set up his own streaming / video publishing service.
YouTube is a massive platform and inherently has power. People used the exact same argument for Twitter but I don’t think you can deny that arbitrary management choices made a huge difference in how it worked, which had substantial impacts that a private company shouldn’t have.
I continue to assert that the solution to this is not to regulate how an individual private company decides who to associate with (which is a core First Amendment right), but rather to pass strong anti-trust laws to prevent any one company from individually having enough power over society.
YouTube should be free to decide who can be on its platform however it sees fit. However, YouTube shouldn’t hold such power over us that when they arbitrarily ban someone it severely harms them.
Network effects mean that most internet platforms form natural monopolies, as a hypothetical scenario in which there are dozens of video websites with idiosyncratic communities, rules and technical constraints would add friction that most inhabitants of the current ecosystem would loathe. This arguably makes Youtube more similar to a public transportation service - imagine if New York's MTA having banned Russell Brand from using its services, and your proposed solution were that strong antitrust laws ought to have forced its deconsolidation and return to the '20s setup with the IRT, BRT and IND networks being separate, so a ban from just one of the public transport networks would not be so dramatic to the individual.
More generally, I have to say that this commonly held idea of corporations enjoying First Amendment rights does not strike me as a natural or necessary interpretation of the FA; and moreover, it frequently seems to be invoked so selectively that the same people who consider a gargantuan public corporation's right to deny custom at will to be a "core First Amendment right" simultaneously snicker at the invocation of First Amendment rights for private individuals they are politically or morally opposed to, and consider instances of politically or morally motivated rejection of customers by small and completely fungible privately held businesses to be a civil rights issue that should definitively not be decided on a First Amendment basis.
> Network effects mean that most internet platforms form natural monopolies
I'm not entirely convinced. I think it's more "unlimited VC money so platforms could operate at a loss for a decade" had way more to do with entrenching these "natural" monopolies.
I recall plenty of social media/video sharing/etc. sites back in the day. I hosted a number of them. They did not die due to lack of popularity, but due to lack of ability to pay for bandwidth and server costs. VC funded folks could just spam money for free, while being told to not even worry about revenue or monetization.
This is around the time the word "startup" became a joke - and instead described a vastly funded corporate enterprise vs. a couple guys in a garage.
Network effects are certainly a thing, but they are so warped by cheap money and the ability to operate for years at huge losses that I'm not convinced they are as strong as suggested. You had no way to compete with Youtube back then backed by Google money. They effectively had free bandwidth for a decade while they figured things out. Competitors actually had to pay bills and staff with actual revenue. The game was over before it began.
> Network effects mean that most internet platforms form natural monopolies
I don’t think these monopolies are nearly as natural as something like transportation on rail infrastructure.
I think there’s a ton of regulation that can and should be applied to these companies that would bite away at how “natural” these monopolies appear (though, some of these require new legislation, for sure, which might be impossible given Congress in the modern area).
We could regulate interoperability, and force major media organizations to provide interpretation to their competitors (similar to how MVNO’s are allowed to buy their backend infra from the major players at or near cost).
We could prevent these “natural monopolies” from being embedded in a larger organization. YouTube’s monopoly might not appear nearly so natural if it was forced to be separated from the rest of Google and stand on its own.
Facebook’s monopoly would not be so natural if it had been prevented from buying every apparent threat to its business in the last decade. If you split up Facebook into its data collection systems, Facebook itself, the ad sales business, Instagram, and WhatsApp, suddenly it’s monopolies aren’t so natural.
Hell, the standard VC playbook of the 2010s was essentially the definition of anti-competitive practices: ignore the costs, ignore the revenues, just lose money on the business in an attempt to dominate the market to a degree that you can raise costs on consumers and no one will be able to stop you. That was the exact VC playbook, and also almost a perfect description of monopolistic behavior and anti-competitive practices.
I don’t think these are natural monopolies at all. I think Congress and regulators were both asleep at the switch for decades while these monopolies slowly formed out of pretty standard anti-competitive practices.
Tear down their walled gardens, separate these behemoths into their actual distinct lines of business, and prevent them from buying every competitor they see and they won’t be so unassailable.
Or just aggressively tax large/high-revenue companies.
And speaking of taxing! I'm not sure why highly-successful companies draw so many more "they have too much power" criticisms than highly-successful individuals who often have power over media companies and spend a lot on lobbying politicians.
For the broader media ecosystem, we used to have stronger regulations preventing individual entities (be them individuals of corporations) from owning certain percentages of the media ecosystem.
I’d be a fan of modernizing that concept, defining social media companies as being a part of the media ecosystem, and lowering that ownership percentage.
Force individual social media companies to be broken up into smaller entities, and force a rollback of a lot of the traditional media consolidation.
It's easy to imagine such things when it relates to owning all the movie theaters or television stations in a given market. But if it's just because people choose to type YouTube into their browser or upload to YouTube over competitors, how do propose to do it?
I would mainly focus on regulating inter-operability, and countering the network effects so that when you have more than a certain share of the media ecosystem you become defined as a “Major Media” organization, and that designation creates additional regulations that you must follow.
Some of those would be interoperability focused (so, YouTube could have competitiors that are only attempting to provide a competing front-end and ad-serving business, while being able to take advantage of YouTube’s storage, bandwidth, and video serving at or near cost, similar to how the MVNO’s are allowed to piggyback off the big carriers). Interoperability would be focused on allowing new competitors to reasonably compete with a slice of YouTube, without forcing them to compete with the entire business.
The biggest one would be forcing divestment of different aspects of the business. I would allow the data collection apparatus that is Google to own the media company that is YouTube. I wouldn’t allow the ad serving business to be owned by the same entity that is the video distribution and playback company. I wouldn’t allow Google to own any other media properties aside from YouTube.
Basically, if you’re a single entity that on its own breaches the ownership threshold, then that single entity becomes the entire business. Everything else must be divested or separated.
Judging by the history of the web, there's a very strong tendancy to form natural monopolies, so I'm not entirely sure you can just legislate away their dominance.
I'd rather see them classed as common carriers. That can't just arbitrarily ban people from the network.
>Brand is free to go elsewhere or set up his own streaming / video publishing service.
Obviously there's problems with this reasoning right? Why bother mentioning pointless rationalization here? You and Youtube both know there's only one video service that offers long form format and that's youtube themselves.
Just tell it like it is. Youtube having a monopoly over online video content is effectively gagging and censoring Brand because of the alleged crimes influencing their business. It is not technically eliminating freedom of speech but it is both practically and effectively doing the same thing.
This points to a an overall problem within the US today regarding freedom of speech. We effectively do not have freedom of speech because all public speaking platforms are controlled by business interests.
That's what's going on here. Not some "oh you're free to go to another video service" bullshit.
He can mention other means for his fans to support him (Patreon et al) and fund raise | blog elsewhere with links to youtube, etc.
It's not beyond the bounds of reason that he may even see an increase in revenue over a longer time period as a result of wearing sackcloth and ashes and complaining about youtube .. just not direct YT revenue.
> You and Youtube both know there's only one video service that offers long form format and that's youtube themselves.
There are others, but YouTube has the largest audience. That's why Brand chose to use it as his platform. There was never a promise of a continuous business relationship. Things get blurry if YouTube decides to keep serving ads with Brand's videos, but doesn't pay him. They can do it, because that's how they wrote the T&Cs, but it doesn't seem fair. I don't think book publishers stop paying royalties to authors who have been accused of criminal behaviour; they may stop printing their books or even pull the books off the shelves, but the accounts will be settled and there will be no further monetization of the author's content.
Exactly. Don't be a coward... say what you mean. Those sentences are synonyms for "fuck off". Use the correct terminology, don't pretend you're being reasonable or rational.
I doubt YouTube worries about being demonetized by advertisers at this point. Where exactly will this advertisers go to advertise on long form videos otherwise?
> I doubt YouTube worries about being demonetized by advertisers at this point.
They've been the target of that twice at least, in 2017 over hate speech [1], in 2019 over pedos[2]. Large brands spend insane amounts of money on advertising, and they do not want their content to appear next to people facing allegations of sexual misconduct or otherwise bad behavior.
Hell just look at Twitter and how much advertising income they lost in the matter of a few months [4], as brands didn't want their ads to show up next to actual Nazis [3]. And instead of recognizing this and getting rid of the Nazis, Musk wants to sue the ADL [5].
They will show ads between videos, and maybe they do that when one or the other is demonetized, but they do not show interstitials on demonetized channels.
It is way too conspiratorial, simply because when it's demonetized it's still shown completely for free with no limits on number of views.
It's as simple as the execs at every fortune 500 company with an advertising budget being religious in some form and being shown "here's your Diet Coke ad next to <insert spiderman+elsa/terorrism/podcast debating if hitler was bad>" by someone with an agenda/some journalist' article. Even if they don't really care, it's enough of a reason to go to Google and get a marketing discount for x years.
At this point I can't tell if Musk sustained a brain injury/infection at some recent date, or he had a handler that was keeping him from touching pointy things and they quit or he fired them and now we're getting unfiltered Musk all day every day.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
It's always possible to make your substantive points while staying within the guidelines. Please do.
> Ultimately the citizens of N Korea are 'free' to move elsewhere
They literally are not. They are held in by landmines and barbed wire. Nobody is going to execute Brand and his entire extended family if he moves away from YouTube. But that WILL happen if you leave North Korea.
Ultimately you can climb over the barbed wire fence and jump over the land mines.
They absolutely have agency to try. Just the same as Brand has agency to set up his own YouTube alternative.
Where do you want to set the limits? Is it at you and your extended family being executed?
What about starving people in Africa? They won't be executed if they leave, so it's their own fault for staying? What about USians that want an abortion? They can travel to another country, what about the first world unemployed in a recession? They could travel off to Africa and subsistence farm rather than complain about their mortgage.
Brand doesn't have a practical alternative to YouTube, so simply saying he can go elsewhere is stupid.
Why should he go? He is not being censored. He is still allowed to post videos, ask for Patreon support, sell tshirts etc… Youtube simply cancelled their commercial partnership.
Rumble is doing well and Brand already has a deal with them. Twitter supports long form video now and the owner is a big supporter. Plenty of other places
It doesn't really matter what their argument is, they simply need to have one. It's their sandbox, and they have chosen an advertiser-friendly ratchet as the driver of policy. YouTube will get more and more bland and samey as people fear the banhammer, which will get used on less and less extreme content and producers, as the "cancelling machinery" has been built and will always find the next-most-evil^tm on which to focus.
Until YouTube becomes boring and enough interesting people end up together somewhere else, and then all the users will leave at once (in internet time).
Doctorow huffs his own farts at a James Cameron level, but he's right about this.
>In England and Wales, more than 99% of rapes reported to police do not end in a conviction. This is the result of a criminal justice system that makes prosecuting rape extremely rare, lengthy and difficult.
An alternative interpretation of what's going on here is that the mainstream justice system is failing, and people are cobbling together an alternative justice system, where public shaming and demonetization are the punishments.
I think building in redundancy to reduce single points of failure is generally a good thing.
I get where you’re coming from, but YouTube doesn’t care about justice. They care about reputational harm and ultimately profits. So if that means demonetizing a victim because that’s what’s profitable, they’ll do that. If it means demonetizing an innocent but unpopular person, they’ll do that. A guilty person not being punished isn’t the only failure mode.
There's a word for that: vigilantism, a word not usually associated with fairness, accountability, or proportionate punishment. That there are voices here that suggest private punishment administered without accountability or due process is, to quote the parent poster, "a good thing" should worry us all.
I hadn't thought of it as a redundancy, Thanks for the perspective shift. It is damming however that our institutions have become so useless and out of reach to the majority of people that we have to implement these obviously flawed system.
It's an interesting thought experiment, but ultimately boils down to one point. YT gets to do whatever they want. The terms of service are designed so they can be selective in their enforcement.
Is it bad policy? Yes. Does it allow for flexibility in a world that is never black and white? Also yes. Honestly, if there was a better solution, what would it be? The questions are endless once you start down this rabbit hole.
No, in my view Youtube can not do whatever they like with this kind of thing, at least as far as my potential outrage is concerned. If Youtube gives a false reason (to me as well as others) about the reason for demonetising someone then I have a problem with that.
When some content is banned from Youtube, it's got positives and negatives. Like when Alex Jones was banned, I was annoyed that I could no longer watch Alex Jones on Youtube if I ever wanted to, but more than that glad that he'd never appear in my autoplay or recommended videos. While I think there is some truth that YouTube can do as it likes, people talking about what their rules are, complaining about them, lobbying Youtube even, is all fair too. A fair complaint would be that the user does not get enough control over what gets recommended. If enough people are talking about that issue, it could motivate Youtube or a competitor to provide that kind of control, as it would be a signal that it would attract an audience to that platform and keep them engaged if recommendation control was a major concern of theirs.
Also, in some circumstances I could be quite annoyed with Youtube for not demonetising or banning some content. It could be something I don't want to watch personally, or more likely something I feel disgusted by such as Elsagate type scandals where the 'protect the children' type argument or instinct in my opinion or feelings override free speech concerns.
People criticising what Youtube does and talking about what a video hosting website would ideally do helps to create the conceptual foundations for the ideal video hosting website, and which Youtube and anyone else who reads the comments can use.
Also, discussing how such a system works produces what would be considered 'prior art' when it comes to patents.
> People criticising what Youtube does and talking about what a video hosting website would ideally do helps to create the conceptual foundations for the ideal video hosting website.
The only problem is that your ideal video hosting website doesn't work. You won't:
a) Get enough users because most people want moderation.
b) Raise enough revenue because most advertisers want moderation.
c) Be able to legally operate because most legislators want moderation.
I never said that my ideal video hosting website would lack moderation.
Ideally I would have control (which I can delegate) over moderation rather than someone I disagreed with, and not have to spend much time or effort on moderation either.
Training and/or fine tuning my own moderation AI would be a useful feature.
After you get fired/retire/die someone else will take over your role. They will have their own ideals. Will they follow your ideals? Maybe. History says not likely.
Communism never succeeds past the first (maybe second) generation before corruption takes root. Same with obtusely vague terms of service and privacy policies. Google circa 2003, awesome. Google circa 2023, not so sure anymore
So what your saying is you want it so I can come to your house/business and talk shit and you have no recourse of kicking the person out, or severing a contract with them?
If you want to deal with Youtube, break them in a way that promotes competition instead of having the largest ad company also owning the largest video company. Trying to otherwise restrict their rights has many other bad outcomes for all businesses and individuals.
He is not being censored. Youtube ends their commercial partnership, because they think he doesn’t fit their brand image. But he can still upload videos, ask for patreon subscriptions, sell tshirts etc…
I believe this is about protecting the ecosystem. YT has basically stopped ads from playing on his content…no advertiser wants to be associated with him right now. If YT didn’t take this action, it’s likely advertisers would pull back on spend because they don’t want to risk being seen along side his content.
YouTube, afaik, doesn’t just let advertisers blacklist individual channels.
> no advertiser wants to be associated with him right now.
I see this sentiment all the time and I just don't understand it. If I sold razor blades, or if I was Stephen He's dad and sold Beijing Corn, I would want EVERYONE buying my product. Communists, Fascists, Russians, Ukrainians, Israelis, Palestinians, Antifa, Proud Boys, Prince Andrew, Andrew Tate, etc.... They may all hate each other but they should all agree that I make the best damn razor blades / canned corn on planet Earth, and everyone should buy it.
This weird era of conspicuous consumption, "lifestyle" branding, and virtue-signaling faux-activism can't end soon enough.
>This weird era of conspicuous consumption, "lifestyle" branding, and virtue-signaling faux-activism can't end soon enough.
This weird era... See this is what blows my mind. Like boycotts are not something that's happened pretty much forever. There is currently a particular group that has been bearing the brunt of boycotts due to their socially unacceptable behavior and they seem a little ticked that the power they once unilaterally wielded is now leveraged against them.
I think because the content algorithms also show you stuff that you are outraged it, you might want your razors blades to be shown to russian watching putin speeches, but you don't want to associate them when the are showing people things they hate.
I think that’s a good way to look at these things. I went through a phase of getting angry at online censorship. In reality, I don’t think corporations will be spending much time debating morals and will simply look at their reputation and bottom line.
Conversely, if I was a sleazy person with a big public profile I'd present myself as an unwavering ally of the common folk, because historically this schtick works incredibly well. Jimmy Saville was considered a living saint in the UK, and it was only after his death that the truth emerged.
Given the whole First Amendment thing the USA has had for a hot minute now, I suspect not. Baseless speculation aside, if you have genuine examples of this occurring, please show the class.
How has it taken YouTube this long, anyway? Hasn’t much of this stuff been openly known for a decade or more? Is YouTube literally just reacting to the media cycle and nothing more?
yeah it's odd, if they do it for brand does that mean they'll now do it for all? of course not and they haven't, this feels unusual for them, so why target brand specifically?
this is going to make his conspiracy's seem true like they are targeting him
but it could be as simple as advertisers don't care about aerosmith because it's bigger than steven tyler, whereas brand is purely a youtube based opinion show and he is the main star of the show
Soon, hopefully. But I don't understand how you think Aerosmith is significant, or somehow countervails Brand. The people who care about Brand's sex pestery tend not to give a shit about Aerosmith. There are always going to be victimizers who haven't been called out, or who haven't yet been dealt with, in every field of endeavor; Robert Kelly is a good example.
It's not as if people who care about sexual assault are somehow lined up in Steven Tyler's corner. Quite the opposite.
I’m not carrying water for Brand-I think all of these Gen X entertainment industry guys are suspect. I’m just trying to figure out how the process works. Why Brand and not Aerosmith (or both) and why don’t the same people care?
R. Kelly was accused innumerable times over the course of over 20 years. I'm sure the truth is going to catch up to Tyler, who bragged about what he did in his memoir.
Same here, but tbh the accusations against Brand are quite moot. Regardless of that, why is YouTube to decide and not a court of law? Of course a private platform can do whatever they want, but when their decision is basically the same as a court issuing fine or damages in the way it affects a person’s livelihood, shouldn’t their decisions be regulated accordingly?
Remind me when right-wing trucking businesses refused to transport Budweiser beer because of their marketing? Or are they refusing to deliver products to Target?
The message there was "do not dare to hire trans people for even minor ads" and result is companies being more afraid to hire trans. So yeah, it was literal ce sorship. And yeah, impact on that trans woman was worst then one on Brand. That trans person was not as rich as to eat any amount of financial looses.
I remember right wing leaders going really out of their way to demonize Budweiser for literally having a single video with trans person and like a can of her face. So yeah. And yes, right wing businesses refused to sell the beer and there was actual boycot.
If that is ok to do because trans person was acknowledged, then yeah, youtube demonetization is equally ok.
If Lululemon tried to market tradwife conservatism to young urban women and it backfired, would you call that censorship? Marketing is about feels and vibes and image—customers are entitled to react to that. Beer, athletic wear, etc., are image and identity-based businesses. That’s different than a trucking company, or a credit card company, or YouTube.
A better example would be the Dixie Chicks boycott after the Bush comments, where major radio stations refused to play their music.
What “right wing media machine?” Obviously, conservative media is going to serve as an outlet for whatever is currently riling up conservatives. The politics is central to their business. That’s different than YouTube, which in theory is a politically neutral platform.
(And note that the boycott here wasn’t even stirred up by Fox or Sinclair. Fox did a Bud Light product placement right before July 4.)
It was not conservative media serving as an outlet for whatever is currently riling up conservatives. It was few conservative personalities creating issue, riling up conservatives and generally trying to create outrage and fear.
That is about it. So, you know, the same people can stuff themselves with complains about YouTube. YouTube is at least honest and not pretending that somehow situation is something it is not.
Explain to me how a MegaCorp using its platform for an unrelated political agenda is in any way similar to individual personalities trying to gin up outrage about something?
A lot of the Bud Light outrage wasn't just Mulvaney - their marketing exec openly said they didn't want those people as customers, so they complied.
There's the difference: People didn't want to buy Bud Light anymore, so their sales tanked.
One feature of cancellation is that the cancellee usually has people who want to hear the cancellee and buy their stuff, but activists try to get them kicked off intermediaries so the cancellee and their customers can't conduct business.
If it was just about making the person unpopular, that'd be an entirely different matter.
Nah, this was just yet another case of right wing media machine trying to pretend they do something else then just normal censorship. Which would be fine if they did not turned around with sophistries when, suddenly, they are not the only ones doing it for a change.
Random people did not reacted to the ad, they reacted to the massive campaign. Which is exactly how the message is understood - trans people have no place in public, anywhere.
Is that really the right way to think about it? Has Brand been convicted of any crime by any government? Seems more accurate to say Youtube is building an alternative security state. Heck, it's rather anarcho-capitalist if you ask me.
> Has Brand been convicted of any crime by any government?
No, he's punished without the due process of law.
And that's how most dictatorial regimes usually deal with miscreants. If you bad-mouthed Breznev nobody would bother with a show-trial unless there was some specific benefit of making you an example. In 9/10 cases they'd fire you from any semi-decent job and won't let your kids finish high school with more than 2.0 GPA.
Let's check for political bias here. Suppose I rewrote your comment so instead of talking about Russell Brand, I'm talking about the right-wing Budweiser boycott. Those right-wingers are punishing Budweiser without due process of law. Just like most dictatorial regimes. How worried are you?
That's the way I think about it based upon my perspective and experience.
> Has Brand been convicted of any crime by any government?
Remains to be seen. The police have been "urged" to investigate, according to the AP. Perhaps the "right way to think" hasn't revealed itself yet?
> Seems more accurate to say Youtube is building an alternative security state.
I see no reason to be so certain the government had no involvement in this case, which you would have to be in order to consider this more accurate than literally any other theory.
> Heck, it's rather anarcho-capitalist if you ask me.
Oh.. it's a "cool" way to undermine human society. I didn't realize.
Nobody seems worried about how this standard gets applied down the road. They all seem focused on the case study but don’t see how this example applies directly to them so obviously.
I am genuinely confused how so many smart people can be so short sighted.
'Community' is defined by them. It does not mean us. It could mean the government, military industrial complex, biopharmaceutical complex, the board of Alphabet, and anybody else they wish to include in it.
It's incredibly easy to get a video demonetized on YouTube now. I don't know what videos you're talking about, but I wouldn't assume that they haven't long since been demonetized.
>we take action to protect the community,” the spokeswoman said.
This really exposes Google's hypocrisy, though. If they were worried about protecting the community, surely they would remove his content and not his ability to monetize it.
They must mean that "community" is being harmed by the content and not by the ads (else the responsible thing would be to shut down altogether ...)
That said, I think Brand's videos are a big pile of barf, though again, if that were the standard, YouTube would have to throw out 90+% of their content...
I'll make one point, which is that if you are a violent asshole who punches anyone in the face that looks at you wrong, you still can't actually harm anyone through Youtube except by trying to convince someone to come get their ass kicked by you.
Russel Brand is accused of grooming a 16 year old girl while he was 31, if true, that means there is the very real possibility that Brand could be using the YT platform as a means for finding other victims.
So I guess Youtube should instead by compelled to continue providing their monetization and hosting services to anyone who wants it until a court of law can prove they are guilty of an actual crime?
Who is going to compel Youtube to continue providing those services again?
That's generally the premise behind "innocent until proven guilty in a court of law", as opposed to "guilty whenever the histrionic internet mob and its tech enablers deem it so".
Except, and I know you must have read this somewhere else by now, that Youtube is not the State.
Your employer (should you have one) doesn't need to wait until a court of law proves you guilty of a stealing paperclips before they fire you, and a restaurant doesn't have to wait until a court proves that you are being a public disturbance before they kick you out.
A private corporation has the right to do whatever they want with their product/service unless they are compelled otherwise by the State. Russell Brand is free to sue Youtube in court if he believes he has been inappropriately damaged, as you do.
Unfortunately for him and all his fans, this isn't hearsay from randos coming out of Reddit/Tumblr, it's a direct accusation with evidence and witnesses in an investigation being conducted by his former employers and the UK police.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, YouTube demonitized all Irish because they unilaterally decided they're all plonkers and they're a private company and they can do what they want. Because that's the level of absurdity here.
Nor do your examples hold water. This isn't a situation of "you were caught stealing paperclips on video". Rather, it's more a case of Sally the tart from accounting has accused you of fingering her in a pub toilet ten years ago when you were both drunk and now ten years later she decides she's upset so let's engage the digital lynch mob and proceed with ruining your life because we all know women never lie.
10%?! 10% is huge. So we should assume presumption of guilt with a 10% error rate?
If 10% of all planes crashed, you would never set foot on one. For comparison, the chance of dying in a plane crash is 0%... to the 7th or 8th decimal place.
The people that should be ashamed are those making false accusations, and those dumb enough to believe them.
You can presume or do anything you want with statistics, but your example was gross and if you think 10% chance of it being correct means you should spout it…yikes
But saying things like that, well..its bad for victims of false accusation as well, notice how I didn’t specify?
Good news is, people who put the type of comments out there like yours - they are their own reward - enjoy the world you are making for yourself, il steer well clear
A single person can have different standards for different situations. Your plane crash example is not about guilt, it's directly about life and death. The threat of being wrong about Russell Brand's alleged sexual assault is quite far removed from my own fear of death. If I mistakenly believe the allegations, I get a personal lesson in the risks of jumping to conclusions and trust YouTube a bit less, but I can still rest relatively easy knowing that criminal courts in the US still use the presumption of innocence. If I mistakenly believe in Brand's innocence, I trust myself a little less, and the next time I find out about a famous stranger's rape allegations I read into it and ask myself whether the denials read like Brand's denials.
But I digress. In this case, YouTube, not a random commenter on Hacker News, had a decision to make. Consider these four possibilities:
1. YouTube demonitizes, allegations are false. YouTube gets social ire from people online and angry politicians, and a few complaints from advertisers, but even the angry people will probably continue to use YouTube due to switching costs.
2. YouTube demonitizes, allegations are true. YouTube pats itself on the back in hindsight. Little changes, but the status quo was good for YouTube anyway.
3. YouTube doesn't demonitize, allegations are false. YouTube temporarily loses a few advertisers before the truth comes out, but things return to the status quo in a few months.
4. YouTube doesn't demonitize, allegations are true. A few advertisers leave for a year or longer. News organizations eagerly field complaints from advertisers and disgruntled YouTube employees.
None of the possibilities are devastating, including money-wise. On the other hand, the fourth possibility is worst for YouTube's reputation by a significant margin, and at a 90% chance too.
Non-sequitor. YT does not need the power of a court decision to take this action. It's basically the same question of "Who made YouTube President"; it's irrelevant.
> Let's say, for the sake of argument, YouTube demonitized all Irish because they unilaterally decided they're all plonkers and they're a private company and they can do what they want. Because that's the level of absurdity here.
I mean YT could decide that your country isn't eligible for YT depending on local laws and block content. Which they do.
Well, I assume Youtube and their community are the judges and juries of Youtube.
I am merely one humble judge and jurist of these comment threads, and I rule that your comment here is disgusting and ignorant.
I recommend a sentence of 100 hours of civics and legal Youtube to help alleviate you of your ignorance. And 1 hour of berating following a public reading of your comment to a group of female accountants dressed as your mother.
> So I guess Youtube should instead by compelled to continue providing their monetization and hosting services to anyone who wants it until a court of law can prove they are guilty of an actual crime?
Yes, in the same way as any other public utility. (They may not have intended to become one but at this point they are)
> Who is going to compel Youtube to continue providing those services again?
Youtube is a subsidiary of a publicly-traded company, it is non-essential, largely unregulated, and for-profit. This is very different from what is considered a "public utility".
If you want to argue that Youtube *should* be considered a public utility company and subject to more stringent government controls then that's a debate that can be had, but as it stands they are not legally obligated to continue doing business with someone they believe to be harming their other customers and partners.
We call that a conviction and a system of law for this. We should use it. I don’t think private corporations that are monopolies should decide who can speak and who cannot. Obviously they can protect their business, but then they shouldn’t be allowed to be universally dominant in a technology category like video.
Oh I’m sorry I wasn’t even thinking about legacy media on that one.
I meant video as in YouTube is UGC video as a content type as they as so market dominant.
The evidence against him is compelling. I just worry that this kind of deplatforming is becoming so normalized I can’t imagine it not becoming a ready political weapon and having a great many unintended concequences.
Trying to dig into their statement is a moot point: R Kelly on Youtube Music is alive and well. You can argue, that it's separate from Youtube. But then here is a search result for R Kelly https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=r+kelly I assume those those videos that come up copyrighted content and someone gets monetization for it? And he his not been merely accused, but convicted.
There are other examples if you dig. This Brand is a tool and can't stand him, but this all happens conveniently right when he gained a little bit of traction by being an outspoken critique of the government.
> But the thing is, a majority of people on Earth are Youtube users, so what the heck does that even mean?
This is an interesting question; why hasn’t anyone verified that these women are YouTube users?
Since we have established that “ecosystem” is a word that means “app developers” and not a broad term that could be interpreted to mean the general environment in which YouTube does business with advertisers and users, this means that YouTube is acting in defense of its users.
Furthermore this announcement gets even more confusing as punching someone in a bar is not something that can faithfully or objectively be separated from (alleged) rape by any community standards or legal bodies, YouTube is in even further hot water here
All this doesn't matter. There is a Social Credit System and Scoring that is implicitly implemented in the Land of the Brave and Free. If you anger the Lords of The Traditional Orthodoxy by shaking your Chains, they will ensure that Sufficient Character Assassination is carried out to reduce your score to pitiful levels. Once that is done, you are deemed as Unfit For Society and then slowly Cancelled and Censored Out Of Existence.
It's simply an excuse to engage in political censure. It's worth remembering that in these people's parlance it's "denying someone's existence" to disagree with their political program or one counter-reality belief they hold, and they do demonetize for it.
YouTube is like HR - they are there to protect the company and the company's revenue streams, not you or "the community".
This is why I think the term "community guidelines" for "censorship policy" is such abusive gaslighting. It's unilateral censorship, not community, and they are rules, not guidelines.
It's the same deceptive drive that renamed "searching your bag" to "security screening" at airports.
I mostly agree but my argument against “rules” is that these things never seem to be unilaterally enforced. So it really is more like a guideline because enforcement is unpredictable in several aspects.
While there’s no reason to believe some broad conspiracy exists, it’d be hilariously ridiculous to assume that the folks at YouTube are unaware of the power they have to influence the zeitgeist. If some number of them act to advance their individual worldview through their enforcement of policy (is there any doubt that this happens?), then it is perfectly reasonable to say that YouTube, as a result of the conscious or unconscious biases of its decision makers, advances a worldview (though perhaps not a specific narrative).
Very much so. It is used to make one's own arguments stronger. "Thank you for listening to the community" actually means "Thank you for listening to me".
Twitter has lost something like 60% of its advertisers because it turns out Proctor and Gamble doesn’t want an ad for Dawn dish detergent next to someone called BasedFuhrer1488 posting about how the Holocaust didn’t happen.
If it wasn’t for that all these platforms would let anything legal go as long as it drove engagement.
It’s not lawyerly nitpicking. The US has a tradition in rule of law, and it’s a social convention that applies broadly.
YouTube, in their statement, is pretending they have an objective standard that is fairly applied to everyone. In reality, there is no uniform standard. They ban people when business interests dictate it.
So their policy reads as “we have an objective standard,” but reality is “we ban when we feel like it.”
YouTube could fix this contradiction by changing their policy to something like “we will ban creators for any reason, at our discretion.”
>The US has a tradition in rule of law, and it’s a social convention that applies broadly.
???
You are conflating all the different legal systems of the US. US criminal law is the one of beyond reasonable doubt. US civil law on the other hand is an entire other bag of worms and 'potential' contractual obligations. On top of that private property has a pretty massive leeway in reasons you can ban people from said properties. There is no contradiction here. "Fuck you, your tie sucks" is a completely valid reason to remove you from their private property. Said person being a dick to others is what is typically considered an exceptionally valid reason to remove them from the property.
If we want to follow a broad social convention, then it is be nice to others, how about that for a start?
If the policy is “Fuck you, your tie sucks”, then that should be written into the policy.
YouTube’s policy does not say “Fuck your, your tie sucks.” They say they remove people for harm to users. But there are many creators who harm users who are not being removed. So that is not the policy.
They can easily fixing this by changing the policy to “fuck you, your tie sucks” or “we ban for any reason at our discretion.”
Until they make that change, it’s perfectly fair to point out the contradiction.
Please feel free to take them to civil court and get the mto change it.
Now, I'm not one for this entire "corporations are people too" thing we have going on in the US, but trying to call Google out for this in particular when the courts have sided with businesses freedom of association until it becomes a civil rights violation in the vast majority of cases. You can point out it as much as you like, but it's mostly a waste of your time until you start championing for 'consumer rights'.
Pretty much a staple of US law is "We withhold the right to refuse service to anyone". There are only a few preconditions (civil rights for example) that are exceptions to this rule.
> They ban people when business interests dictate it.
That is the standard. They're a private company. They're offering free services to content creators to host their content. In exchange for an ad partnership and revenue.
But YouTube/Google is the company, and for them this is a business. If they think hosting someone is bad for business they can stop hosting them.
How is it everyone here is so pro-Liberty yet fails to understand that the Libertarian position is that YouTube and the people that run it are free to host or promote whatever content they want that makes them money (as long as it's not against the law), and they can choose to not.
Brand is free to take his content somewhere else.
He is not entitled to YouTube's hosting privileges, and they're not entitled to him hosting his content there.
Are they not still associated with an alleged rapist by hosting and monetising his content, but not sharing the profits with the content creator? They should just give him notice to close his account if that is the case and close his account.
By demonetizing him, they’ve “done something” and if there is a further outcry they can take more drastic steps. It’s like the very first West Wing episode “a proportional response”.
They just want to be seen as “doing something” and if they do it first they seem cooler than other platforms. Didnt deplatform him, just demonetized. They have done this to a lot of other non-mainstream political voices.
Oh I see, you seem to think he hasn't had this treatment before. I guess you missed the dozen previous times he's complained about the system trying to silence him. It's totally on-brand for Brand.
Allegedly. If a bunch of people come forward accusing you of assault, odds are pretty good you did it.
However, private businesses punishing people for having charges brought against them but not yet tried? That's judge, jury and executioner, which is incompatible with the set of laws that the US is built on - for which the source material was English Law, and precedent even older than that.
So an American company pre-punishing a Brit based on a news article is the beginning of another level of dystopia none of us wants.
Brand is not being executed. There has never been a principle in US or English law that you have to do business with everyone all the time. There are, in modern times, certain protected classes that you cannot discriminate against. Otherwise, you are free not to do business with someone, or to set the terms on which you are willing to do business with them. Alleged rapists are not a protected class.
In fairness there is a discussion that needs to be had about private businesses that have the de facto power to wreck people's lives if they decide to de-platform them. I think that applies more to businesses like banks and payment services providers that can literally make it difficult for you to obtain food and shelter than it does to social media or content hosting platforms, which are relatively easy to self-host. In any event, it has nothing to do with the criminal law concept of "innocent until proven guilty".
> There has never been a principle in US or English law that you have to do business with everyone all the time. There are, in modern times, certain protected classes that you cannot discriminate against. Otherwise, you are free not to do business with someone, or to set the terms on which you are willing to do business with them. Alleged rapists are not a protected class.
There's long been a principle that the innocent have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Protected class laws exist because, in their absence, too many businesses chose to discriminate against the same groups of people - but surely that reasoning applies even more strongly to discriminating against those accused of serious crimes. (Indeed historically there's a lot of overlap between the two - many lynchings were justified with rape allegations).
> I think that applies more to businesses like banks and payment services providers that can literally make it difficult for you to obtain food and shelter than it does to social media or content hosting platforms, which are relatively easy to self-host.
Realistically there are at most two viable video platforms (and if anyone is to blame for that it's the government, not Brand). If someone can take away your ability to make money they can make it hard for you to obtain food and shelter just as much as if they were refusing to sell food to you.
By the definition of "punish" that you are implicitly using, private businesses in America used to be able to punish people for anything ("we reserve the right to refuse service to anybody"). Now there are certain things they cannot punish people for (e.g. being black). Are you suggesting that the time has come to mandate that companies may not discriminate against customers for other reasons as well?
> Now there are certain things they cannot punish people for (e.g. being black). Are you suggesting that the time has come to mandate that companies may not discriminate against customers for other reasons as well?
We should pick one or the other. Either it's fine to discriminate for any reason, or some businesses have a public service obligation and must serve anyone.
I think many (maybe even a majority of?) Americans consider individual freedom to be a deontological moral good. This includes freedoms of those running private businesses. The "Protected Class" rules were created because many (including some overlap with the first set of) Americans didn't like specific consequences of enforcing that moral good.
Policy in a well-functioning, pluralistic, society will necessarily have (occasionally self-contradictory) compromises because we are trying to satisfy groups of people with sometimes conflicting needs and values.
It seems to be going the other way in the US. Recently, in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, it was found that discrimination against customers who "violate your values", in that case by being gay, was fine.
I’m not sure that case is relevant to the YouTube example, as YouTube isn’t refusing to or being compelled to create new works on behalf of Brand, or whatever the closest analogy here would be. Refusing service based on protected attributes tends to be far more explicitly addressed, in the US and likely many other countries.
I'd rather we sorted out what 'the commons' means in an online context, but failing that? Yes. Because we're essentially privatizing all discourse and those companies can do pretty much whatever they want - as long as they don't piss off other companies too badly (eg, Twitter being demonetized because of Nazis).
We've lost the idea of broadcasting in the public interest decades ago, and there's no PBS for the internet (Just PBS on the Internet)
This has never been the standard for businesses. "Innocent until proven guilty" is only applicable in criminal court.
OJ didn't keep his endorsements after he murdered Nicole and Goldman, he lost them well ahead of the trial, and the businesses shouldn't have been forced to continue them because he was a toxic asset even after he was found not guilty.
Russel Brand is not a spokesman for YouTube though. Nor is a gay couple a spokesman for a photographer.
Some photographers offer a discount if they can use your pictures. If you don’t want to feature “gross boys kissing each other” or a Star Trek themed wedding in your portfolio, fine, or not fine actually, but whatever. However it’s getting a little late in the day to still want to shun people because of who they sleep with (consent and ability to give consent notwithstanding).
I typed “avoid” but changed it to “shun” because I find there’s an important difference between not wanting to hang out with cosplayers or gay men and not selling them a cake that you don’t even have to be present for. And who the hell knows who made your wedding cake anyway? Really? Is that even a thing? I’ve only had one wedding and we kept it as simple as possible so we could spend more on the honeymoon. We might have sprung for a cake from the fancy bakery. In fact now that I say that I think we did. But it wasn’t a defining moment, as evidenced by the fact that it took me a while to remember that happened. I know the place we had the ceremony, and the reception. And the bad photographer’s assistant with the broken flash mount that kept falling over and ruining her shots. Fuck the cake. My cake didn’t define my wedding and definitely didn’t define the shop, which is the point here. We were just two stupid kids buying a cake.
People have gotten crazy about weddings. So I’ll allow there’s ample space between “reasonable human” and “actual human” to get up to mischief.
>is the beginning of another level of dystopia none of us wants
This 'dystopia' is called freedom of association and I can confidentially tell you that I personally support the rights of any business to choose who they enter contracts with and not to do business with a likely sex offender, so I think you ought to speak for yourself.
There is no basis on which to compel a private business to host everyone's content and I would in fact consider that to be quite dystopian.
And if you are wrong, are you also willing to apologize for hasty decision making? Or will you hide behind the crowd and say 'well everyone else said X!'
Because that's what is happening right now. People's lives are ruined on the assumption of someone being the big bad. Then when it turns out the situation is far more nuanced and delicate, the social damage is already done. Not just the big guys like Brand, who got enough millions to throw lawyer after lawyer at the case should he be innocent, but also the small guys who have a far weaker position socially and financially.
Suddenly this is the thread that has snapped for you and said this is wrong? For most of modern history an accusation was all that was needed to have you removed from your job. The cops showing up at your office and just 'questioning' your behavior around minors without even making accusations is generally enough to ensure you don't come back the next day. It's one of the reasons I don't post as little information about myself online as I can. Doxxing can have terrible outcomes.
> The cops showing up at your office and just 'questioning' your behavior around minors without even making accusations is generally enough to ensure you don't come back the next day.
For the record, 16 is the age of consent in Britain. No doubt it's fair to have the ick about a 31 year old involved with someone so young, but Brand was never alleged to have been involved with minors.
>Suddenly this is the thread that has snapped for you and said this is wrong?
How about we take our own advice, stop making assumptions and "be nice" as you put it, hm?
>The cops showing up at your office and just 'questioning' your behavior around minors without even making accusations is generally enough to ensure you don't come back the next day.
I'd like you to honestly think deeply about this a few times. Has this really been the same as it was a few decades ago? Why do some countries or areas feel far more comfortable with leaving children around with men, while it seems the US in particular has trouble even imagining a dad wants to spend time with his kids? And why is it primarily the men, when it's become more and more obvious women are just a much perpetrators?
Yes, false accusations and ruining people's lives over them has been a thing since we exist. You ever wonder why so many people freak out the moment they are accused, despite being innocent? But as a society, we can fight and be critical about this. Just like we got rid of witch hunts, so too can we think twice about companies facing next to zero repercussions by hiding in the crowd despite their disproportional power.
All I'm saying is, if you're the coward throwing others under the bus over your own gain, don't be surprised if a rebel fed up with your cowardice decides to do the same. Turnabout's fair play, after all.
And for real: it's just an apology. I'm not telling these companies to pay damages or get dragged to court. It's just a 5 minute effort to say "Oh we were too quick in our judgment, sorry about that". It isn't enough, but it's the bare minimum they can do without having to drag them to court to force it or threatening to take away their position of power. The fact they can't even do that speaks volumes.
>Why do some countries or areas feel far more comfortable with leaving children around with men,
I cannot answer for other countries, but for the US I can answer that we've allowed the "boys will be boys" excuse for pretty much ever when it comes to sexual misconduct. I've made it a point in my life to be a person available to talk to when other people need that. Maybe I've just had bad luck in who has opened up to me, but when a very large percentage of the women I've talked with have talked about sexual misconduct, sexual abuse, or outright rape against them that I realize we have a massive problem in this country. Even worse is I've talked to people decades later that explained confusing things that occurred when I was a teenager and went to church. When you find out the church covers up sexual assault, convinces people not to call the police, and pays for the pastor to move elsewhere you get a grim view on the people in power. It turns out when you cover up for evil behavior, you have to be suspect of all those around you.
If you don't want people to be destroyed by allegations, you need a system that actually investigates discretely, and prosecutes those with evidence against them. In the US we can't even process the back log of rape kits we have around.
>And if you are wrong, are you also willing to apologize for hasty decision making?
Yes, although it would be a first given the severity of the accusations.
But more importantly that's entirely besides the point. You don't need a good reason, or even much of any reason at all to not do business with someone. Case in point, you can decide to not sell a wedding cake to a same sex couple because that offends your religious beliefs. That's a pretty silly and homophobic justification by most people's standards, certainly more controversial than not doing business with a suspected criminal.
But it's a good thing that right exists. If someone is innocently accused take that up with the accuser, don't interfere with the freedom of private business. It's not any third parties decision that ruined them, it's people spreading falsehoods.
It's just as certain to say that if you're an egotistical narcissist jugggling drug and sex addiction for a decade+ under a celebrity spotlight and on record as having had sex with five different women a day between appearences then a handful of those encounters were very probably the kind that were forced under the presumption of consent while drug addled.
Liability. It all comes back to liability. I can't tell you what kind of cases have legal standing against YouTube for showing videos of an alleged abuser, but I trust that many smart and less scrupulous lawyers could.
Did I read this correctly? It sounds like YouTube will continue to host his content, but will now pocket the money they would have paid him.
That doesn't seem right to me. If they were to cease hosting his material, that would maych their corporate-speak blurb. This sounds to me like more money for YouTube.
> It sounds like YouTube will continue to host his content, but will now pocket the money they would have paid him.
If he is demonetized, then his videos won’t get ad placement, so Google won’t make the money in the first place, as it will contribute neither to advertising revenue nor to the marginal benefit from the Premium users derived compared to non-Premium users in avoiding ads.
Since Google pays creators less than it makes from their content, Google is giving up money (in a narrow analysis) by demonetizing Brand, not keeping additional money. (In a broader analysis, the rational for demonetizing is that monetizing toxic content hurts the brand and alienates advvertisers, so it is profitable to demonetize that content in the long run despite the immediate hit from any particular decision to do so.)
The exception is demonetization for certain copyright claims, which effectively isn’t “really” demonetization, its letting the copyright holder take the creators place for monetization.
There's complete demonetization where videos have no ads altogether (e.g., videos from BBC if you're in UK).
There's partial stuff like Content ID matches. If you post my song, YT still shows ads, but you get no money. I now get your ad money (and YT its cut).
Not sure what they meant in case of Russell Brand, but I bet they will show ads for advertisers who don't opt out and pocket the profit.
I have noticed quite edgy videos that were ad-free before now heavily feature ads, so not sure about that. Many advertisers are not even based in the US, UK or any western country.
Not showing ads is the same as just burning money for Google.
I would not be surprised if there is some P(controversy | viewing user, time elapsed since original flagging) metric, and when it goes below a threshold, certain non-prestige or international ads can be shown - ads not likely to cause any problems.
I can confirm that Youtube runs ads on demonetized videos. This includes- videos where the creator didn't monetize it, videos that were monetized at first, but got monetization removed after review of reports, and videos where the creator don't yet qualify for monetization.
This is true, I have a youtube channel. When it wasn't monetised yet back then, my friends and family saw the ads at the beginning and the end of my videos. Thinking that I already made money from the first couple of videos that I made
While Youtube may be discounting direct revenue from this specific and limited set of content, Alphabet recognises the value of ostensibly being the quasi-exclusive repository & catalogue of video content.
Denying to their "users"/viewers the availability of some subset of content hurts their reputation more than "losing" a negligeable fraction of direct monetisation.
Leaving aside the morality of repudiating monetisation while allowing access, this is a sound strategy for maintaining the Youtube platform's monopoly and raison d'être. Which is after all the core of their ability to maximise shareholder value, and what else matters to a corporation?
If you’re just starting out and don’t qualify to become a “partner”, you can’t monetize your videos until you reach X amount of subscribers and Y amount of watch hours.
This doesn’t mean your videos won’t have ads on them. They most assuredly will have ads on them. It just means that YouTube doesn’t consider you good enough to share the revenue with you.
Load of BS of course.
Either content is good enough to place ads on, revenue of which is shared, or your content isn’t good enough to place ads on. Making profit over someone else’s content (however abhorrent the person might be) is just dirty imho.
A reasonable point, but the lack of transparency from YouTube's end means their pitch to content creators is basically 'trust us.' There's no way for new entrants to the market to predict how much they can make in proportion to views, so they're incentivized to just chase the lowest common denominator all the time.
Given the scale and metrics involved, seems pretty nominal. Maybe not free, but for the context might as well be. Something that could be highly automated if it were transparent and fair.
I work in the space... that level of visibility is a trade secret because it exposes contracts like isp hosting costs... it's also hard to calculate... and it's definitely non-trivial.
it's not going to be exposed because why show your cards, you're not a CDN. And there's a reason people use YouTube not CDNs and it's not just the complexity and discovery, it's still not super cheap.
To be honest, YouTube should be charging hosting fees to people who don't qualify for the partner program. The fact that they try to make up the shortfall through ads is a huge favor
Youtube is a free platform to host video content, they themselves need to pay the bills. At a particular point that your videos become "valuable" they offer to provide you with a cut.
The grey area is potentially how they determine the value
Right, but there's a difference between "we don't think this person should be profiting from our platform because they are causing harm" and "we think this person causes harm so we're going to let them use the platform but take the money we would have paid them".
You need to read my comment in response to the person I commented on, not the whole post itself. Their comment was in relation to how Youtube monetizes videos in general, not in relation to Russell and my comment was in relation to monetisation in general, not in relation to Russell.
However, I do agree with your comment. If the videos cause harm them nobody should be profiting from them and realistically they should be taken offline as well.
My understanding is that when a channel's content is not monetized, no ads are displayed. So no, YouTube is not pocketing the money they would have paid him.
YT most certainly runs ads against demonetized content. They just don't share in the take with the creator. What a principled stance... "I will make even more money because you did something bad somewhere else!"
No. Since there is a lot of disagreement about this in the surrounding comments, I just watched 20m of an old Russell Brand YT video. As of a few minutes ago there were no YT ads in the video. That includes the very beginning and the end. However there were Brand narrated promotions in the video.
The video was actually much easier to watch without the blasted YT ads that normally pop up every 5 minutes. And I suppose Brand still gets paid 100% for the embedded promos he narrated and negotiated with the advertisers.
What Youtubers call "demonetization" usually refers to their monetization status changing to "limited to no ads." Even if their video is in the category of "limited" ads, the video tends to make a small fraction of what a regular video would make because there are fewer bidders for these ad slots, so from their perspective, it's basically the same as not being paid at all. In Russell Brand's case, it looks like his channel got completely demonetized, so his channel shouldn't have any ads.
There's a bit more nuance to that. Some advertisers can choose to put ads on videos that are labelled undesirable. But because there's less advertiser demand for ads on such videos, they're generally very cheap.
There was a time after I took a media class where I had insomnia and watched a lot of late night TV. I knew about targeted advertising, and the kinds of ads on late night TV at the time… oh boy. The lowest quality camerawork, dialog, and product. For a while I felt insulted, that they thought I was the target audience for this schlock. Then I realized that no, this is just the cheapest ad slots of the day, and so they are running bottom of the barrel ads during this time.
So I guess we can expect to see wannabe-Billy Mays ads on demonetized shows.
unless they changed things, last year YT made it impossible to not display ads on your videos even if you wanted to let people watch your videos without ads
I believe this is true when you are a partner and you opt out of ads for a video. But if you're not a partner yet, then YT will serve ads that you don't receive any income for.
The less money that creators get from YouTube, the better. Content becomes a swamp when content gets monetized for the creator. The internet was so much better before everything was monetized. The platform should always be pocketing all the money.
Just like how Youtube will demonetize videos with things like violent retro video games. But they don't take down the video or hide it, they just collect all the ad revenue for themselves.
Like every social media platform the "community guidelines" are written to be purposely subjective and vague, such that the enforcement of the guidelines can be done arbitrarily, per the whim of the company and their agents.
Not just social media. Stripe and Square have similar wiggle-room and it's a demonization felt pretty directly. Amazon, Etsy and others - their policies give room to pick and choose winners - and change policy on a whim - and apply it inconsistently.
Corporate Overlords don't have to engage on Rights - it's all in the Privilege realm.
I worked at a (big) company when they changed their policy to include this vagueness. It was all over this guy spreading mass disinformation and conspiracy theories that were actively harmful. There was a lot of discussion about “yeah, I agree this is bad… but, this is a slippery slope,” and “how can you think we should let him use OUR platform to do this,” type arguments. We were a privately held company at the time, and this is what the owner wanted to do.
So we changed the terms. I felt like the T&S team (trust and safety) sighed a huge sigh of relief because they were having to deal with advertisers and bereft families complaining.
Anyway, it became a very heavy hammer that was very rarely used except in extreme circumstances.
I imagine not every company uses it as sparingly but it’s a much needed clause to deplatform certain kinds of charismatic people who are harmful to humanity. I don’t know anything about this particular case, nor do I want to know even a TL;DR. I’m just here for the comments and your comment chain struck a nerve.
>I imagine not every company uses it as sparingly but it’s a much needed clause to deplatform certain kinds of charismatic people who are harmful to humanity.
if companies really cared about humanity, most of them would close shop. Corporate activism is truly scary, as they game the system to acquire virtue to be immune to criticism and even get kickbacks from "aligned" politicians. Fascism 2.0 is really weird
Nature of the allogations aside, isn't this what possibly happened to Brand? He spoke things that many wished went unsaid. Eventually the "terms & conditions" were tweaked so to speak and now the critic is silenced, marginalized and humiliated.
Russel Brand has just had a number of sexual assault allegations made against him [1]. I would assume Youtube's decision is linked to those allegations rather than the content of his channel, since his channel content has been pretty consistent
Yes, but why did they wish it unsaid? Is it because he's speakin (uncomfortable) truth to power, or because he's an ignorant man spreading potentially dangerous narratives?
Good way to piss off some people and encourage competitors. We need business reform, they do nothing in society to be deserving of authority in any measure.
No clue whether Brand is innocent or guilty before the law, but if he's exonerated would he have grounds to sue YouTube/Google or do the terms of service allow YouTube to demonetize people based on accusations even if they turn out to be false at a later time?
Unlikely, since uploaders don't really have a contractual relationship with YouTube. Platform operators can just arbitrarily kick people off with no recourse or accountability or even a clear explanation. There's no workaround for this except through regulation, aka government overreach into the free market destroying jobs and freedoms (as objections are usually phrased).
Small nit: YouTube has to adhere to it’s Terms of Service and any other “click to agree” policies. However, those documents and policies are incredibly broad like you mentioned.
Which say very clearly that they can kick you off at any time for any reason, similar to those “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone” (unless the reason is racism, religion and other protected categories)
> Courts continually hold that a business must serve persons they don’t like or agree with.
In the US, at least, generally only when the act at issue would discriminate on a specific, enumerated, legally protected basis that applies to the business and business transaction in question, and if the business does not have some right (including its First Amendment rights) that trump the specific application of the law in question in the context of the actual act at issue.
The exception is for the fairly narrow set of businesses to which stricter neutrality regulations apply, like phone companies, but that’s a very small set of businesses.
Yes this. If I want to I can kick every Republican or MAGA hat out of my cafe with no legal risk. But I can't kick them out because they are Christian / Muslim or Black / White or Gay / Straight. Some of these things are considered to be outside of the control of the individual. They are innate. You can't choose if you're white or gay or to some degree Christian. If you're thinking that the religious exception feels weird given the rest on the list, I'd agree. But at the same time religious indoctrination in childhood when a child has literally no recourse but to follow what their parents say puts them at a major disadvantage to coming to terms with reality. If I acknowledge that a fundamentalist Christian growing up in the US would be just as likely to be a fundamentalist Muslim were they born in a different country really puts into question the "choice" aspect of religion. Some folks manage to escape it, but for most the social and cultural aspects and risk of ostracization keep them in the fold.
That's sadly dismissive of an actual problem. In matters of sex crimes, men are effectively assumed guilty until proven otherwise, and even if they're eventually found innocent they get their lives destroyed. The bar is much, much higher for female rape to be considered realistic.
The accusations might be true but it doesn't really matter until it is found as such in a court of law. Trial by media is an aberration, the modern equivalent of medieval shaming practices.
OJ Simpson was not found guilty of murder in a criminal setting, yet he was still a pariah.
It took years from the first public accusation for Harvey Weinstein’s case to come to trial. Was it wrong for his production company to fire him before a judge had rendered judgement?
> Was it wrong for his production company to fire him before a judge had rendered judgement?
Yes. One's support for universal rights is really tested when the accused is clearly Not A Nice Person.
Imagine of being accused of rape, even though you're totally innocent, and your employer (or your customers) suddenly dropping you. Would that be fair?
No, it wouldn't be fair. But I'm not going to get angry at something that rarely happens.
Instead I'm thinking of about all the women who'd have had to work alongside Harvey Weinstein in your hypothetical, while knowing he had abused people they themselves knew.
To make this personal: I discovered CSAM on my boss's laptop. I reported it to my employer and he was fired before he was found guilty. My boss worked with children almost every day. I don't want to imagine a world in which he would have been allowed to hang onto that job.
That's a safeguarding measure that is very specific to certain jobs. Does streaming a YT video put any woman at risk of harassment? Obviously not. Can a film producer be kept away from potential victims, with a bit of effort from the employer? Probably yes.
Working yourself up in a rage is not what one should do when discussing law. Before you know it, you'll be doing things that history will probably condemn you for later on.
> That's a safeguarding measure that is very specific to certain jobs.
Safeguarding from what exactly? If they're innocent until proven guilty, there shouldn't be any safeguarding necessary. By your earlier argument, saying "you can't work with kids anymore" is rushing to judgement.
Life is not one and zeroes. Safeguards are just insurance policies, taken out in specific circumstances to insulate from potential risk which might well never materialize. Just because a driver is insured doesn't mean he's ever crashed or going to crash.
Thats a really frustrating example because there is a lot of evidence, and over literal years- yet nobody came forward which allowed him to be a predator for decades.
How can the law help if nobody is coming forward? I do not understand.
Your argument about guilty until proven innocent still doesn't stand though.
Johnny Depp was the quintessential counter-example of this, dropped by everyone and smeared publicly by the media; until his PR team with the help of the law cleared it up (a little too well in my opinion).
> The letter of the law allows anyone to be guilty of rape, in the U.S. at least
That actually varies based on jurisdiction, some states have separate laws with different offense names (often with similar conditions and punishments) for different kinds of sexual assaults, and still have “rape” being specific in the same way that it is in Britain, in some states and the federal system, “rape” is not a specific offense named in statute but is sometimes used as an informal name for some offenses. (E.g., in the federal system, the title of the relevant section including, but not limited to, the common law definition of “rape” is “sexual abuse” [0], and the word “rape” does not appear anywhere in it.)
As an example, Trump was found civilly liable for Sexual Assault but could not be found liable for Rape because the jury found he only penetrated the victim with his fingers and not his penis.
Absolutely not. You can sue for being discriminated against based on a protected class (as said in the sibling comment), but otherwise the entire internet hinges on platforms being able to ban people who they "don't like or agree with" since they usually disagree on 'how much spam is acceptable' or 'whether hardcore porn should exist on YouTube.com'.
Not really, YouTube can terminate your account for any reason. If the accusations are false, and if they're the reason why he lost monetization, he could sue the accusers for damages.
In addition to the contracts, YT could easily say even the implication he may have done wrong is not good for their business to associate with. He needn't be convicted in a court of law for it to be bad business to continue to work with him.
Probably would have to go after the false accusers for defamation and damages incurred… probably not worth it.
That said, mere unsupported allegations leading to serious material consequences is a dystopian quagmire and should be actionable in a legal sense without regard to the absurdly inequitable stipulations put forth in the T&C.
The Monetization Window is the new Overton Window. I think people underestimate how much Youtube's monetization policy influences what popular creators put in videos. Because it's not just the money - it also effects how videos are promoted by the algorithm.
I wonder if YouTube takes into consideration local values when doing this. For example, nudity and other controversial stuff can have much different standards on what's acceptable and what's not. If this is not baked into the formula, then it's likely that YouTube is pushing cultures to align with SV or some managers in Google.
I'm not going to defend Russel Brand, just making a point about YT's impact. This time around maybe many people agree with their decisions on content but what happens if the managers change and the rules change with them? What happens if Andrew Tate types get positions in the corporate? Will people be OK about promoting videos about how you can make money by pimping your girlfriend on live stream and how to recruit more girlfriends and demonetise videos on climate change?
It's very disturbing that those utility level services can pick winners and losers. IMHO, we need to move to a model where if you can moderate content you are liable for the content. If you don't want to be liable for content then you should have nothing to do with that content, just provide the service and cooperate with the law enforcement when they are after someone who posts illegal content.
You can't be the curator and have no responsibility, and if you don't want responsibility don't be the curator.
I'm sorry that you don't like this unpopular opinion but we need to go to the dumb wire days of the telephone companies who couldn't control what people say on the phone and if their services were used to do bad things it was the law enforcements job to deal with it.
> but we need to go to the dumb wire days of the telephone companies who couldn't control what people say on the phone and if their services were used to do bad things it was the law enforcements job to deal with it.
That is today. You do not get to control Google’s computers.
Buy your own server(s), buy your own bandwidth, and do what you please.
Lobby your representatives to make symmetric fiber internet a utility to each home, and implement ipv6 so you can serve content from your house and not have to depend on bigger companies to get around CGNAT.
This is like saying that if you don't like the planet Earth, find yourself a planet suitable to terraform, go there terraform it, populate it the way you like and live there.
Sure, you can do that but you can also solve the problem at hand. Ownership, money, property etc. are all constructs based on a social contract, Sundar Pichai by himself can't have control on more than a suitcase and a vehicle maybe - he can control Alphabet only because as a society we decided to operate in a certain way and sounds he makes and finger movements he does end up steering giant network of people who interact with other networks of people who happen to have control over some machinery. This means, if the social contract isn't working out we can change that social contract to suits our needs better. One change can be about how computers that transmit videos over TCP/IP should operate.
> This is like saying that if you don't like the planet Earth, find yourself a planet suitable to terraform, go there terraform it, populate it the way you like and live there.
Not at all like that because building a video hosting service is a relatively trivial task, with the only limitation being money. Which the US government has more of than Google.
> Sure, you can do that but you can also solve the problem at hand.
I would rather the government provide the video hosting as a utility rather than commandeer Google’s computers.
Symmetric fibre internet exists in many European countries, and is readily available to a large bulk of citizens in those countries already. I pay $25pm for 500Mbps symmetric today.
I can’t fly to another planet and terraform it. I can (and do) host my own video streams however.
It's not about the tech. Plenty of people could have built Twitter from scratch, but Musk had to pay over $40B to have Twitter and no one came around to offer him to build a Twitter for $39B.
>but Musk had to pay over $40B to have Twitter and no one came around to offer him to build a Twitter for $39B.
As far as I understand, musk offered $40B for Twitter, unprompted. Is there any evidence that he put out offers to build an alternative for $39B? Because I feel like it would have been taken up given the widespread belief that he was overpaying, and even Musk believed that since he tried to back out.
The internet is no longer decentralized and interoperable. It's all walled gardens. Want to send an email? Better be on a major email platform or none of your messages will arrive.
Guaranteeing internet access as a utility is a great idea but by itself it's only an illusion of freedom. Access to things like Google accounts / AWS / cloudflare and of course the banking system and payment processor duopoly also need to be guaranteed to some degree all law abiding citizens.
Edit: I don't think this applies in the case here with Russell Brand and demonitization. There should obviously not be any right to be paid by advertisers.
Government should offer email (and identity verification) as a utility. And if the populace wants video streaming as a utility, then that too, although I would rather the government simply provide high quality fiber internet connections as a utility since that is limiting factor in hosting your videos.
Government is also extremely inefficient. To build the service it'll cost them 10x more than private companies doing it. How much do you want to pay in taxes? There will come a point that even if the government actually is trying, that even if the entire GDP is converted the taxes that it'll still end up with a worse quality of life for the rest of us. Governments is easily corrupt and extremely inefficient. Its almost never the answer.
I don’t think so. Email is low barrier to entry, and a constitutionally protected email account would protect people’s ability to communicate electronically, especially if the government is going to communicate via email with you.
USPS can handle it all. SMS 2FA should also be replaced with something that is legally protected no matter what, so it doesn’t matter if you get blocked by Google/Apple/ATT/Verizon/etc, you can still live your life.
There’s a bit more to it than this. If you run afoul of the big payment processors like Visa and Mastercard, you may find it difficult to even pay for the stuff you mentioned (or get paid).
The ideal of companies being able to refuse service makes sense from a freedom perspective but in reality we have a handful of very skewed markets, and there is often no “municipal alternative” to support those who have been blacklisted.
So the solution is to create those “municipal alternatives”. Constitutionally guaranteed electronic money account and ability to receive and send money, constitutionally guaranteed access to internet, email, and identity verification services, provided by the government.
And any abuse should be prosecuted by the government.
Then why were you crying the other day that the US needs to nationalize SpaceX to help Ukraine? Can’t they just built their own space based internet network?
And if you don’t moderate at all you get deluged under piles of crap, hate speech, spam, and bot-created garbage. Might as well not even try. In any sort of forum context, zero moderation makes it useless at least for most.
Moderation against abuse of your own system is fine, that's given. Even electricity companies will go after you if you abuse their grid but they won't care what kind of videos you film using their electricity.
However I don't think that YouTube should decide what's hate speech and ban it. If that speech is illegal, the law enforcement should find the person. Maybe it can be acceptable to let the law enforcement delete videos but that's also risky because that's how you can get speech suppression when the government isn't very good.
Hate speech is not illegal in the US. Youtube is not judging what speech is legal or not, they're just making a decision about which types of content they want to distribute.
Then that speech should remain on YouTube and those concern by the content of the speech should simply produce counterarguments and discredit that speech.
I don't know, what about teaching the kids the history of hate they can recognise BS and just don't pay attention to it?
You can't delegate raising your kids to YouTube, right? What about the grown ups you say, well words are not spells - just because someone said that some group of people are sub-human doesn't make others believe that. We are not photocopiers, we are humans.
That hate speech claiming that some group of people are "stain on our planet" will probably claim other stuff like conspiracies and alternative history. Go after those if you are concerned.
> That hate speech claiming that some group of people are "stain on our planet" will probably claim other stuff like conspiracies and alternative history. Go after those if you are concerned.
Wait, so youtube shouldn't go after hate speech, because that's legal in the US, but should go after conspiracies and alternative history, despite those also being legal in the US? This doesn't make sense.
I don't understand then, can you explain where I got it wrong?
madeofpalk said "Hate speech is not illegal in the US. [...]"
to which you responded "Then that speech should remain on YouTube and those concern by the content of the speech should simply produce counterarguments and discredit that speech."
I take this to mean that you think hate speech shouldn't be removed from youtube because it isn't illegal in the US.
Then you said "That hate speech claiming that some group of people are "stain on our planet" will probably claim other stuff like conspiracies and alternative history. Go after those if you are concerned."
I take this to mean that you think people who claim stuff like conspiracies and alternative history are fair game for youtube to "go after". But those things are just as legal as hate speech in America.
Or maybe they were saying, “Don’t argue with an Idiot”. Or were referencing the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle.
If you do want to argue, and correct the grave injustice of someone being wrong on the internet, something like history might be a better topic as you will have more of a basis for argument - although in my experience people can find a way to be obtuse and redirect discussions about anything…sometimes the only winning move is not to play.
It’s not YouTube that’s supposed to go after those, it’s those who have concerns that should go after those who concern them with their speech. That’s the main point of my whole argument.
Anyway, I really don’t enjoy arguing over semantic. If I say I don’t mean that, it means I don’t mean that but it’s possible that I wasn’t articulate enough.
Twitter's community notes works quite well. I don't think that people are incapable of discussion.
IMHO the problem is anonymity combined with some harmful dopamine loop, making people act horribly. Maybe even putting the age of the poster next to the nickname will reduce the heat of the discussion quite a bit.
Have you ever seen the kind of stuff people post on Facebook or on local news sites under their own name, next to their own photographs? These theories about internet civility have been disproven repeatedly over the past decade plus.
Yep. Who was hurt by all that? The problems arise when bunch of incels congregate on some anonymous imageboards or forums.
People saying dumbs stuff with no follow up is never a problem. If anything, they are quite interesting because you can look at those and see what kind of stuff they believe and talk about IRL. There are people analysing those to tackle actual issues because banning it online doesn't stop it from beings discussed in private or small groups.
They were hurt but I’m not convinced that it was due to online posting. IMHO, Facebook was a reflection of what’s happening in real life. FB banning it would not do a thing, maybe change the timing due to the butterfly effect. What they(those who care about Rohingya people) should have done was to use these posts as intelligence about what’s about to happen and take precautions.
You’re just passing the problem off to someone else who won’t do anything about it. Unmoderated sites are cesspools in general. But I guess they’re at least unfiltered cesspools.
> then it's likely that YouTube is pushing cultures to align with SV or some managers in Google.
This is as sure as that the sun will rise tomorrow. I have absolutely no doubt that the rest of the world is culturally influenced by the larger SV companies.
> we need to move to a model where if you can moderate content you are liable for the content.
Hasn't pushing cultural norms on others always been the case with American-centric media? Before silicon valley it was Hollywood. They've got all the big budgets to produce hyperviolent movies but lord help you, if there's an uncovered boob, then it's an R rating and a much tougher pitch to studios.
Modern auction based ad platforms are much less economically sensitive to the pressure of advertiser ethics than traditional ad platforms like cable TV.
If one advertiser pulls out for ethical reasons their placement goes to the next bidder at an infinitesimally smaller price. And at the back of the line there’s always a game developer willing to pay a couple of dollars per install.
This is why the Facebook ad boycotts were so ineffective. Especially compared to the impact of the Twitter ad boycott - with Twitter having never developed a modern auction based platform.
The YouTube “adpocalypse” suggests that YouTube is sensitive to it in a way that google and Facebook aren’t. I don’t know how their ad purchasing system works though.
If that revenue model doesn't work YT should find a new one or seize to exists.
It's not god's given right to run a profitable business, businesses who harm the society and can't find ways to operate at profit without harming the society go out of business all the time.
The answer to that is yes, kind of. Google only really cares what people say in English and perhaps some other major languages. Speech in less common languages is less moderated in general across the internet.
It's not just video content either, Google's been fucking up the whole Internet for a while now.
Do you want a high search ranking for your site? It's far more important to appease Google's algorithms than provide quality content your users enjoy.
Want to make money off Google Ads? You need to be very careful about what you put on your site. They sent me a threatening letter once because I promoted World Naked Gardening Day.
Running a "successful" website nowadays revolves around keeping Google happy. If you fail to do that, they can destroy your business.
This is how ad-subsidized media has always worked. You worked for a television network has a team of censors that protected it from reputational damage. You had to listen to them if you wanted your show to air.
Heh, I bet there is an age gap here in the replies. Older people remember the days of TV/magazines where if you did the wrong thing, suddenly your face disappeared from the media like it never existed. Then the wild west days of the internet was a weird time where there was all kinds of crazy crap on the net. Now we've recentralized the services and it looks like traditional media.
I do not blame Google on this. They are behaving in their business interests exactly the way one should expect. The problem is as a society we grow massive corporations that have large near monopolies over multiple aspects of the internet and think it's perfectly fine.
This is something I think is overlooked very often. I feel like a constant narrative I hear is that censoring media like this is a new-fangled concept when in reality this has been standard practice forever.
Curated vs non-curated content. Apples and oranges.
Why can't social media add flags to accounts? Discusses weapons, discusses police shootings, violence, under accusation of <x>, trans/queer promotion, terf or anti- trans/queer, then advertisers can select which flags they don't want to be associated with?
This is a very interesting point. Tech-media companies (Google, Meta, Tik Tok) increasingly serve a similar gatekeeper function for public discourse that TV networks (ABC, NBC, CBS) did 50 years ago.
You would really enjoy the Chinese internet world, where legions of "gatekeepers" at Bytedance et al. bravely patrol the cyber world and rapidly eliminate any undesirable utterance. It's very clean and reassuring.
I think the main difference is that traditionally, this gatekeeper function was "decentralized". That is, ABC, NBC, CBS, New York Times, The Atlantic, Baltimore Sun, etc. etc. etc. all made their own editorial decisions, and there were dozens – if not hundreds – of decisions being made, rather than just a small handful of them.
This is still true to some extent, but the distribution of stories relies a lot more on a small handful of companies. Previously the distribution (newspaper stands and the like) might also refuse to carry some issues they found particularly objectionably, but again, these decisions were "distributed" much more than it is today, and it didn't affect subscribers of the newspaper or magazine.
Not that the previous system was perfect either or always worked well, or didn't have their downsides, but it's not really the same, IMHO.
Isn't it a bit ridiculous that a guy like that *has to* make his money through YouTube? Make a podcast! Tour! I'm not going to go. I'm trying to spend my money on people who bring value to the world.
Yet, the dystopic future you describe is not 100% there yet.
The monetization window has everything to do with the advertiser confort window. That is "are we alienating a big chunk of the population being associated with that", where big is in dollars, not in people
So it is a lens that distorts what society deems 'acceptable' -- and that phase itself has its own set of complications
Matt Taibbi brought up a case of a guy who put up montages of Trump saying the 2020 election was rigged cut up with clips of liberal media figures saying the Russians stole 2016.
Pure trolling, kind of funny, 100% clips of public figures with no commentary. Demonetized.
Not even close. Taibbi made it sound like Biden, who wasn't in office, pulled strings to have the government lean on Twitter to suppress important scandalous revelations from Hunter Biden's Laptop. The reality was that Trump was in office at the time and the Biden team, as private citizens, requested TOS enforcement on Hunter's naked pics and received it.
Yes, some of the TOS enforcement hit conservative outlets merely on account of association with the material despite the fact that they made an effort to censor the private pics, but from the emails it was crystal clear that this was because twitter lacked a mechanism to grant special trust to these outlets and not an intentional effort to kill a story (and a sorry nothingburger of a story at that). Revenge porn doesn't typically have a legitimate public interest involved; their infrastructure to deal with this edge case was not well developed.
Ro Khanna (D) was the only Dem in office to wander into the fray and he did it on the side of Free Speech. Interesting how that tends to get omitted from the story.
Thanks, Republicans. You defeated the terrible censorship. Now I know what THEY didn't want me to: Hunter Biden has a huge cock.
The Twitter files encompasses more than just the Hunter Biden laptop story (where the FBI did indeed say the story was likely disinformation , despite knowing it was true. Whether this was bureaucratic dysfunction or deliberate remains unclear).
It also encompassed purported COVID misinformation (much of which turned out to be true). Government agencies and government sponsored NGOs did indeed direct social media to ban specific individuals advocating against blanket lockdowns.
The notion that Taibbi et al. aimed to show that Biden is some illuminati-like shadow figure ruling the world secretly is a straw man. It did indeed show what it sought out to prove: the government directly and indirectly directed the censorship carried out by large social media companies and often labeled true facts as misinformation.
I limited my investigation to the Hunter Biden Laptop story in the first Twitter Files release; the dishonesty I saw from Musk and Taibbi on that subject was enough to pass judgement.
The Republican MO is to pivot to a different claim in the firehose-of-falsehood the moment you get called out. I'm not impressed.
> Taibbi made it sound like Biden, who wasn't in office, pulled strings to have the government lean on Twitter to suppress important scandalous revelations from Hunter Biden's Laptop
This is not at all what was claimed. The focus on the Hunter laptop censorship was on the FBI confirming (or at least strongly suggesting) that the story was disinformation despite the fact that the FBI knew of its veracity. Not due to any string pulling by Biden.
Yes, there were meetings between twitter and the feds monitoring Prigozhin's bot farms. Taibbi implied -- over and over again, as you are now -- that these meetings saw the feds lean on Twitter to suppress the Hunter Biden Laptop story. They didn't.
Not only did the feds not lean on Twitter to suppress Hunter's dick picks, but the coordination that I saw is actually coordination I want to see. Yeah, the spooks should talk with the social networks, so long as the social networks can check and balance the requests. If you disagree I would like you to explain to me what is so important about allowing Dimitri Prigozhin's bot farms to go unchallenged? Do you want another TEN_GOP incident, where a prominent republican account turns out to literally be run out of Dimitri Prigozhin's IRA just outside Moscow? I'd think you would want to avoid another embarrassment like that.
> Taibbi implied -- over and over again, as you are now -- that these meetings saw the feds lean on Twitter to suppress the Hunter Biden Laptop story. They didn't
Incorrect. What Taibbi wrote was that Twitter approached the FBI, asking whether the laptop story was misinformation. The FBI had in fact known that this was a genuine hard drive long before it reached the press (nearly a year before) but nonetheless said that the story was probably a misinformation campaign.
The government leaning on social media was not related to the laptop story. That came later, in 2021, where the government worked through NGO proxies to lean on social media to ban people arguing against lockdowns and even supplying lists of users to ban or suppress.
The 5th Circuit had ample time to review the evidence and found it compelling enough to uphold the injunction. Do you think these judges are just being duped by misinformation?
>Taibbi made it sound like Biden, who wasn't in office, pulled strings to have the government lean on Twitter to suppress important scandalous revelations from Hunter Biden's Laptop.
The Twitter files were very specific about the plethora of 3-letter agencies set up to do nothing but make censorship requests. Your claim is a strawman.
Ignoring the fact that there were concerted efforts by people in various government branches to attack and get rid of Trump while he was president makes your argument silly.
Just because Trump was in office doesn't mean his political enemies in the government were unable to use their governmental powers to censor speech that would help Trump get reelected.
Didn't he read an acronym wrong and it was a nongovernmental agency in one of the most prominent examples he used? And Biden wasn't in office for the laptop stuff but Trump was for the stuff they requested get removed?
> Taibbi has admitted mistaking CIS for CISA in a single tweet in one of his many threads, but his testimony to Congress was entirely different. Hasan deceptively conflated this quickly corrected tweet with Taibbi’s testimony.
> But the evidence shows that Taibbi’s congressional remarks were correct. CIS and CISA collaborated with EIP on moderation requests, with both organizations directly appealing to Twitter for censorship, making Taibbi’s overall point and particular argument completely accurate.
He swapped them in one particular tweet, quickly corrected, but it was nowhere near "one of the most prominent examples".
Twitter were revealed to have an active relationship with the US government to quash "misinformation" that they didn't like (which turned out to include things that are true but might be helpful to Trump's electoral prospects) while promoting misinformation that the FBI thinks is helpful to them [0].
This is authoritarianism and government corruption of the public discourse. It is hard to tell if it is new (the FBI seems to have had similar relationships with the corporate media since forever ago) but it is profoundly anti-liberty and a real betrayal of the freedom and openness that the tech companies stood up for in the early 2000s.
> And Biden wasn't in office for the laptop stuff but Trump was for the stuff they requested get removed?
While I do think it is less controversial than some people pretend - many politicians appear to have a lot more money than they should - it is naive in the extreme to say that being in office is the major factor when paying off politicians. Joe Bidan has held political offices since 1970s and is a significant force in the Democratic party, the returns on slipping him money would have been quite high whether he is in office or not.
The idea isn't to get a specific couple of lines slipped into a bill, the idea is to guide the long term narrative. Think the difference between quashing a single Jeff Epstein investigation vs covering up the entire scandal over multiple years.
Several "non-governmental" agencies (like the Election Integrity Partnership or the Stanford Internet Observatory[0]) were involved in making recommendations to censor. I say "non-governmental" in quotes because entities like SIO receive a lot of federal funding, and key players shuttle back and forth between private and government functions.
> Biden wasn't in office for the laptop stuff but Trump was
I'm not sure what "laptop stuff" you're referring to, but whether Biden, Trump, or whoever else was in office has no bearing on the illegality of the executive actions in question.
Zuckerberg said that the FBI pressured Facebook over Hunter Biden, you can look it up if you want another datapoint.
Anyone who votes on Hunter Biden's personal habits is a dummy but there was definitely a coordinated campaign to call it "disinformation" despite the dude's actual dick being in the pictures.
Are you talking about on Joe Rogan? He didn't say that at all. He said they later assumed they were talking about the laptop from something they said earlier that was much more general about upcoming Russian misinfo.
Uh, I guess one could phrase it that way but it's rather dishonest.
It'd be akin to saying a police officer testifying that they saw X person shoot Y person as attempting to deplatform X person.
--
Honestly the only thing questionable in the twitter files was the USG telling twiter which accounts were their cy-ops accounts so they wouldn't get banned.
Twitter having a policy of you can't do Y on the platform and the USG asking Twitter if X person is violating Y is not illegal censorship.
You understand that USG in reference to the twitter files means Donald Trump as he happened to be in charge of the executive branch during that period?
All governmental prosecution should be before a court with the protection of rights. Even in your contrived example, the defendant has the right to face his accuser, cross-examine, attorneys, judges, juries, and the many things we throw in the government's way of harming people, justified or not.
When the USG tells anyone to do something, chances are they will comply, legal or not, just because it isn't worth the pain and suffering of fighting, especially for someone you don't even know. We have relearning what it is like to have your personal life ruled by people you have never met in places you have never been. The USG has stepped too far and the overreaction to public/private partnerships is coming.
Are you serious? A US District Court as well as the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found that those files were not in fact a joke, and that the federal executive did strong-arm private entities like Twitter to censor.
It's almost certainly fair use. The Copyright Act explicitly allows the use of copyrighted material for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, and the like. Courts have historically been sensitive to First Amendment concerns when copyrighted materials are used for transformative purposes. In Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569 (1994), the U.S. Supreme Court emphasized the transformative nature of parody as a form of commentary, giving it a wide berth under fair use.
Now, onto the crux of your argument about implicit commentary. Even if a work does not contain explicit commentary, the juxtaposition of clips alone can function as a form of critique or commentary. This is especially relevant when highlighting inconsistencies or ironies in public discourse. While there isn't direct commentary, the act of selectively piecing together these clips communicates a larger point or message. Courts often look at the 'purpose and character' of the use, and if it is transformative—adding new meaning or context—it's generally favored under fair use.
Thank you for explaining this. It is obvious if you think about it, but some commenters seem to think copyright can be used as some kind of loophole to shield public figures from exposure of their public behaviour.
You can do that if you want to risk a legal battle, but Youtube doesn't care about your legal battle until its over. The fact of the matter is that footage can be copyrighted and videographers have the right to protect their copyright. If I go film Trump giving a speech with the sole purpose of selling that material to news agencies and you decide to release that footage on your own platform, then you're at risk of infringing on that copyright. The only way to completely decide if you're infringing on their copyright is through a court case. Currently, outside of unique cases like "response videos," it's common for Youtube to side with the copyright owner. So I'm betting Youtube demonetized it for infringing on copyright.
I agree that YouTube will often side with the copyright holder - I’m a Rick Beato fan, and there’s a practical risk of demonetization or removal on that platform. However, it’s crucial to differentiate between what YouTube decides to do and what the actual law permits under fair use. YouTube’s policies don’t necessarily reflect a balanced interpretation of copyright law.
When it comes to copyright law itself, montage videos of politicians that serve a transformative purpose, such as critique or commentary, fit squarely within the realm of fair use, as established by various court precedents. So, while you may face a challenge on platforms like YouTube, the underlying legality of such videos is more accommodating than those platforms might suggest.
No. As someone who works in documentaries, you absolutely have to license footage of public figures, including news footage. There’s a reason most news media shoot their own footage.
If you are commentating on it and making significant changes, then it can be fair use.
The public figure can't copyright their appearance, but whoever recorded the clip absolutely has a copyright on it.
The funniest thing about copyright issues is that whenever they come up, people are so confidently wrong about the actual law. Lots of stuff on YouTube is only permitted because the rightsholders allow it to stay up - every cover of every modern song, for example.
> Lots of stuff on YouTube is only permitted because the rightsholders allow it to stay up - every cover of every modern song, for example.
And many of those rights-holders only allow it because YouTube built a mechanism that helps them detect these uses and then automatically siphon off ad revenue it generates.
I'm honestly confused what people get upset about using a private platform. If you want better accountability argue for an open platform uncontrolled by capital. What is the point of complaining while suggesting nothing? This conversation is even more useless than the old "marketplace of ideas" bullshit.
At some point the private platform becomes so influential over the information environment and politics that it can no longer be considered merely a private platform. It is now also a public square. It’s not unreasonable at that point to require it to adhere higher standards of evidence, law, and reason.
In this case, I’m no fan of Brand, but I’m even less a fan of YouTube’s apparent policy of “guilty till proven innocent” here. How about waiting till he and his accuser/s have had their day in a court, and jury of peers weighs the evidence and decides his guilt?
I am also very much a free speech absolutist. But demonetization is different. Anyone who wants to see the video still can, so Russel Brand has not had his freedom of speech restricted in any way.
This is not a policy of guilty until proven innocent. It's a policy of "advertisers don't want to be associated with rapists." And while there is a good argument for allowing access to YouTube as a public square, there is no such argument for allowing access to YouTube as an advertising platform.
Is that even true? Are there no convicted rapists with monetized youtube channels? Youtube does background checks? Or they merely take action when someone's crime(s) make it into the news? That seems rather arbitrary and short-sighted. Some journalist or cabal of journalists can write a viral article about someone, about something that happened a decade or more ago, and a corporation will unilaterally decide to end the economic aspect of their relationship with the person?
Sorry, what does this have to do with the legal system? Twitter and youtube are free to exclude service in any way they please, sans for protected classes (which is nearly impossible to demonstrate in practice).
I'd also like to point out that a court determing legal guilt has precisely zero standing in terms of actual guilt. Courts are fallible systems that fail every day and are a terrible metric for determining what actually happened.
Fair enough point. Fwiw I don’t consider myself a free speech absolutist, and have no problem with restricting speech that incites harming other people, among other things.
Then break up Google from YT and their ad network. Have more competition in the market. You are going to get exactly the opposite of what you want by having one huge monopoly that's controlled by the government on what they can and cannot say.
>It’s not unreasonable at that point to require it to adhere higher standards of evidence, law, and reason.
Civil law is based on contract. Nearly every civil contract regarding media has disparagement clauses.
> At some point the private platform becomes so influential over the information environment and politics that it can no longer be considered merely a private platform.
Good luck taking that up with the department of justice.
I honestly have no clue what you're trying to get at—just because you want a space to be public doesn't change the legal reality.
Problem is that we are at a point at which these 'private platforms' are in a position to do serious damage to public speech primarily due to network effects. They dont become important venues of speech until they are a dominant portion (if not outright monopoly) of communication medium. This is structural & will not be resolved on its own unless some other non-profit seeking entity (Govt) enforces it. As it is we are losing the 'money is speech' battle because of 'Citizen's United' (google it), This left unchecked will just make it hopeless.
It interesting seeing Mr Beast talk about AB testing thumbnails — his old style was apparently not actually what the algorithm wanted but he'd never tested it properly.
There was another style other than him looking stupefied with his mouth open? I'd be fine if that face disappeared off Youtube entirely because everyone seems to have copied that.
Content goes on there based on the promise of money, not the reality of it. If you’ve watched YouTube enough you know how many content producers have come to grips with how much/little money they are actually making and have adjusted their strategy.
I like for instance LTT’s philosophy on merch and patreon as money streams for review oriented content: if the majority or plurality of your sponsorship comes from manufacturers, how can anyone be sure that you’re bringing objectivity to those reviews? How can you be sure you are? So keep sponsors locked into a small pool of your revenue, that way everyone knows you can walk away from them at any time and still keep the lights on. There’s less temptation to even attempt coercion, because the leverage is weak at best.
That's an interesting case. I honestly don't know what is more accurate here: to show more recent photos after the transition or ignore that and mostly show the older photos that reflect the name (but not the person) more accurately.
This is why contract law exists. You can cancel me, sure, go ahead, but you will pay up. With youtube, the contract is written, in the TOS, to 100% favor youtube.
See also "cerveza sickness" for when any discussion about COVID would get you flagged, and any narrative except the latest globalist one was tolerated.
It's really what advertisers are willing to put up with. Unfortunately most companies are run by cowards and I know for a fact that having your ad presented alongside something controversial doesn't imply the brand supports it
Unfortunately, there's a load minority who try to push this when this far from the truth.
When a channel is demonetized does that mean YouTube doesn't run ads at all on the channel's content, or do they still run ads and just don't pay out the share to the creator?
Agree. One can only interpret this as ham-fisted virtue signaling by YouTube management and perhaps with staff support.
If they are continuing to host and serve the Brand videos, they are defacto saying, "content by this person doesn't hurt our platform in a material way, but we've decided this person is bad and we want to show ourselves punishing him." And the best part is they are tangibly rewarded in this by not having to pay the creator's share of the revenue. No matter what Brand may or may not be guilty of... continuing to stream his content without paying for it is despicable and immoral.
Properly thought about, moral judgement of what YouTube is doing is completely independent of anything Brand had done.
This is irrelevant as to how to morally judge Google's actions.
If someone finds a way into my home, steals some stuff, and then I block the path that they took to get in or had the ability to block that path: the thief is still culpable of a moral transgression against me. Even if I didn't take the action I could to prevent the thief from entering my home again and they did so and stole more: the thief is still willful committing a moral transgression against me. It may be unwise for me to not take preventative measures, but it doesn't change the correctness of judging the thief as a miscreant. The thief's willful act to steal is all that matters in judging them and the same holds for Google here (again, assuming they are continuing to stream and profit from Brand's content without compensating him).
To suggest otherwise is a different form of the old trope of the woman that gets raped, but dresses and acts suggestively is at fault. Her actions may not have been wise, but the moral (and criminal) judgment still goes against the perpetrator who acted willfully to commit the crime and it does so without regard to the woman's actions.
The ability to upload to YT is at YouTube's own discretion and thus their terms are imposed on that content. YouTube doesn't have to host his stuff if they don't want to, nor do they have to give them any money. Brand has the legal right to switch to a competing video platform.
I would put forward that a less morally dubious way for YT to handle this would be to pull ads, and send the creator a pay-for-hosting agreement that they're required to sign if they want to keep the content online.
I think it's more curious they're willing to at least imply moral imperative and say "this bad guy can't make money on our platform" but continue to distribute and profit off his content themselves. It's not immediately clear to me which is worse...
Since they didn't say that, no they probably don't think that. Just like me saying "I don't work for free" doesn't imply I think that my salary is also the exact net cost I have as expenditure for doing the work.
They didn't dispute that, they suggested a line of logic for the behaviour. It being a reply to your comment doesn't automatically mean it's an attempt to prove your comment wrong.
Well they actually host a bunch of videos that they wont allow people to monetize. Is that an issue too? Is monetization a right of a user, TOS be damned?
Russel Brand is still allowed to view youtubes, even post videos. The company that has built, maintained and spent to allow all that has removed the ability from a user user to monetize his videos, but hasn't even silenced him.
I don't know if shutting down his channel and removing all the videos (which Google has a legal right to do) would be better.
> Well they actually host a bunch of videos that they wont allow people to monetize. Is that an issue too?
Personally, I say absolutely yes. Particularly because they'll still platform questionable content, sell ad space against it, and take the payout all for themselves.
Monetization is not a moral judgment of the content, it's a business judgment of what high-paying advertisers are willing to be associated with. There are plenty of criteria for monetization that don't have anything to do with the moral value of the content.
You're right, Youtube isn't forced to host the works of this horrid rule-breaker. They choose the position of platforming him and profiting off of him however.
Making the content isn't free either. If they don't like Russel Brand for whatever reason, they're free to deplatform him. Virtue signaling while lining your pockets is disingenuous.
Went to YouTube.coms Russel Brand page, clicked the shortest video, let it play.
After the video, ad played, then the next Russell Brand video.
Next video was longer and included marked ads throughout the video, clearly pausing the ad content and labeled with a pop-up.
Also, YouTube still has its pop up that say, "Video contains paid promotion," so they know he is profiting off the video and are still allowing it AND YouTube is profiting from ad between videos.
Overall, I'd say YES, they are still allowing ads, they probably just suspended payments for "In-video" YouTube 3rd parts ads, really only 1 of 4 ad types they are serving.
Both YouTube and Russel Brand continue to make money off ads on Russell Brands videos on YouTube.
I don't think this is quite right - as the other comments point out, Youtube will still play ads and they take 100% cut of the money. They have already announced that Brand is demonetized, so they will pay him 0% while taking 100% of the ad revenue for themselves.
Somethings that happen from I remember from other demonetised channels: - no revenue share from YT - no superchats (via YT) - most of the ads are turned off due to brand deals with YT and risk of being associated with some banned channel
YouTube ads are a tiny % of revenue. Celebrities on YT make their money from brand deals, not ads. Remember "Adpocalypse" and the beginning of all this ultra clean PC talk online? Before all that, sure you could make a living from YT ads, but many channels don't even have them on because it's cents. For example I have over 50k views on some videos, but the ad revenue is nothing.
"“He is most likely making £2,000 to £4,000 per video, not taking into account any affiliate deals and brand sponsorships that might be running in the background,” she said.
Based on five videos a week, this could easily produce the best part of a £1m a year."
Glad to see you deleted your other reply that was just rude.
I'd agree with the other person (and even if I agreed with you, I'd still point out that your language and attitude are quite against the HN guidelines, which are worth reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html )
I'd personally be surprised if Russel Brand had more than $1M/yr in sponsorship deals relating to his YouTube content, which would be 50/50 split between that and ads (I think likely to be more like 75/25 in favour of ads for him).
Yes for many celebrities, and even YouTube content creators, their sponsorships will be far more valuable than the platform's ads. But I doubt there are big-money deals lining up for the kind of conspiracy nonsense he puts out now days.
(And sure, Brand also makes money from work other than YouTube, but that's not relevant to the question of what % of money for YT content comes from YT ads vs. sponsors.)
"A tiny %" to me would be 1, maybe 2%. Do you really believe he's earning $100 mil a year? I read that his estimated worth is in the low 20 millions but I can't recall where I saw that.
No, but it is kind of a good point because it looks like they turned of youtubes "in-video" ads but he still has clearly marked paid promotions and "built in" ads/promotions he does like a podcast. So both Brand and YouTube are still making almost the same money right now even though they, "aren't monetizing".
The direct parent commenter (i.e. the person the comment responds to) cannot downvote. It just does not show a downvote button for them, only an upvote button. So the downvotes have to come from everyone else.
Benny, there are valid reasons to downvote for you first comment to say nothing about your replies. Your top level comment is now gray and that is not because of jahsome.
Perhaps a moral opportunity if you believe that people credibly accused of and under investigation for rape (Brand) or spreading white supremacist dog whistle conspiracy theories (Carlson) is a moral imperative.
Not such a great opportunity when you consider that the audience for this sort of content is poorly-educated, credulous, reactionary, and anathema to advertisers who can actually support the businesses behind the platforms.
This is the most surprising thing about Elon's lurch to the right: it has already cost him c.40% of Twitter's ad revenue because, huge surprise, nobody wants to be associated with conspiracy theorists even when they aren't rapists or racists.
To say the kinds of things you're saying betrays that you just blindly believe whatever you're told. How can you say that and then seemingly unaware go on to call others credulous and poorly-educated? It's remarkable.
Isn’t Brand on Rumble? He already does live shows on Rumble. Less followers, less money I assume but doesn’t seem like he’ll be kicked off Rumble anytime soon.
I am not sure how long X can keep doing this. Elon is under tremendous pressure from the establishment. It's likely that he will either align with Facebook and YouTube's policies or be compelled to relinquish control of X.
There are no actual charges against him. Nobody has said under oath that anything has happened. The most recent allegation is for something that happened 10 years ago.
I'm of the opinion (and I know the law disagrees with me in the U.S.) that you should not be able to bring charges against someone for a non capital offense, where all the evidence is he-said/she-said. a decade after the event happend. Our memories just aren't good enough for that.
That's all well and good, but it's weird to see automatically HN conclude that people distancing themselves from Brand are overreacting to a few allegations and not the more likely scenario: that there are more stories like this of Brand and it's been an open secret in entertainment for years.
Since these accusations, several famous people who have worked with him have come out with stories consistent with this behavior. Could it all be untrue, and there's some kind of witch hunt on Brand? I guess, but if it truly was an open secret, it makes perfect sense that people would distance themselves from him now when it comes out to the public.
No one has the right to win the popularity contest of celebrity. If the world wants to turn their back on you then you cannot force them not to. It would be as foolish as feeling aggrieved about not winning an election (an example that’s hard to use nowadays.)
hUH? I'd have the same opionion against some poor non-celebrity if someone were to make he-said/she-said charges a decade later. Even if it were to happen to you!
more importantly, they've not even been charged for.
personally i'd be surprised if the guy wasn't a rapist, he spent a decade virtually admitting it and acting like one, but it's absolutely fucked that that all somebody (person, newspaper, content creator, whatever) needs to do to completely and permanently take away someone's livelihood is call them a rapist on the internet.
our society is irreparably broken at this point, there's no coming back from any of this.
Youtube turned subscription numbers into a gameable metric for some time, so they got heavily inflated, so then Youtube basically made them meaningless. Youtube rarely even shows your subscribers your new videos nowadays, and for many creators, subscribers are about 20% or less of their total views.
In general it seems like if you keep ignoring videos from a given channel you're subscribed to, they will stop appearing most of the time in the default view despite the fact that you are subscribed, although they'll still appear if you go to the "subscriptions" view.
Basically in the default view I'm not sure it even makes much difference whether you're actually subscribed to a given channel or not; it seems like it's more about whether or not you've viewed the channel's videos recently.
I don't think it's unusual for creators who put out videos on various topics extremely frequently when most of their subscribers aren't watching every video.
It basically just means that the average subscriber is watching ~2 of his videos a month.
Putting aside recent allegations, it's disappointing what has happened to Russell Brand's YouTube channel. I watched some of his videos a few years ago and they were interesting discussions of the news with a particular emphasis on questioning everything which I see as a healthy habit. Inevitably though, the algorithm steered the videos to become more clickbaity, divisive, and frankly crazy. He probably saw that outrage-bait videos were getting double the views. YouTube's algorithm plays a massive part in what goes into people's heads and they should be held more accountable.
More accurately, the algorithm gave Brand incentive to change his videos. "The algorithm" can't steer the video directly; it needs to influence the content creators. It's the conscious decision, following incentives, of these people to change their content. And while we can understand why they may have done it, that doesn't make them blameless.
His decent into outrage-bait, alt-right friendly nonsense struck me as abrupt. One minute his channel was reasonable enough, the next it was totally nuts.
Part of me wonders whether this was calculated once he knew that a major expose was circling. I have zero evidence for this, but you can see the logic. Court a following that is sceptical of everything, and that will see an investigation by the 'mainstream media' as obvious evidence of some deep state conspiracy. You now have an army of cheerleaders, and an alternative renevue source, ready to wage war with.
> His decent into outrage-bait, alt-right friendly nonsense struck me as abrupt. One minute his channel was reasonable enough, the next it was totally nuts.
An observation of mine going back to the 90s when I was a kid and liked listening to the radio: Talk show hosts would always lure you in with something that sounds reasonable, and use it to segue into a topic that sounded absolutely nuts.
That overall trend into insanity sounds like taking the exact same concept and doing it over a much longer timeline lol. That way they've established themselves in the community as a trusted 'podcast' source, and once they have an audience they start blasting crazy shit with hopes that at least some people will listen and consider it "thought provocative"
I cannot see how the army would be of any use in the eventuality of the major expose. There was this other person with huge following among scepticals of everything (sorry I don't remember the name exactly) who got a huge fine recently. I don't believe justice would look the other way, if anything, it may be attracting scrutiny with attention.
Money, PR, astroturfed protests, moral support. This can be true even for people in prison in legally non-controversial cases of murder. Quite a few serial/mass killers have fan clubs. I don't mean true crime nerds who happen to be interested in a particular villain, I mean literal fan clubs that write regularly, put money in the prison commissary account, recruit other fans and so on.
playing devil's advocate here for a moment : having that 'army' would eventually be useful if say you knew an exposé was on the way because they may become an exploitable market once the mainstream throws you to the wayside over the allegations.
the 'army' can be fed some insider-flavored tripe : "THEY are using this to get me.", "Of course this comes out when i'm trying to expose the truth", etc etc.
So, in other words, the 'army' isn't directly useful against the allegations necessarily, but as a fall cushion once those allegations and possible criminal charges land and alienate the rest of the 'normal' public from you.
Alex Jones/Sandy Hook comes to mind. In some warped sense, the criminal allegations and justice pursuit towards Alex Jones with regards to his comments regarding the Sandy Hook shootings cemented him as a 'victim of the system' for a lot of his adherents; much to the dismay of everyone else.
No, it just shows you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve watched his videos, it is nothing like Alex Jones. I knew you wouldn’t be able to back up your claims.
As I said, if you need to ask why his recent videos are unsound and you've watched them all, then I'm not sure what more I can say. It's going to be hard to have a fruitful discussion and your tone underlines that for me.
If it makes you feel better to think I don't know what I'm talking about then I can live with that.
All I’m asking is for one example of what he’s said that’s “totally nuts”. You’re the one that made the claim, and now you refuse to back it up. Perhaps instead of believing clickbait headlines, you should actually watch his videos and decide for yourself whether they are actually “nuts” or if you’re being lied to.
Depressingly for me, I once admired him, so I'm familiar with his output. I went off him a good few years ago as I felt he was becoming incoherent even then. I then watched a few of his recent videos in horror. The shift was quite extreme and I wonder what happened. This article sums it up perfectly. There are many good examples right there and I've (unfortunately) watched a few of the videos alluded to. Graham Hancock, the great reset. Seriously?!
You can disagree with me if you want, but I've assessed his recent output, and to me it's a confusing mess of half truths, baseless conspiracies mixed in with the odd insight. He's not a good thinker. He's all over the place.
This is what I suspected you meant by "totally nuts". The thing is, if you get all your news from the establishment, you think these things are totally nuts.
When you go beyond corporate-backed news and listen to a variety of independent journalists and commentators, you start realizing over time that some of these things that sounded crazy at first may actually be legitimate, and it's not from reptition - it's from how things in the world unfold. You start seeing evidence pile up over the months, you start seeing the lies of corporate media, you do start questioning everything.
So saying something like Fauci should be in jail would have sounded nuts before, doesn't sound nuts when you've seen the evidence pile up over time.
The question I always ask people who are inline with the establishment is this: Which INDEPENDENT journalists do you follow that align with what you think? I never get an answer.
His channel went from 500k to 20 million viewers when he went off the rails. It could all have been an elaborate 4D chess gambit or alternatively he could just like money and attention.
Russel Brand, at least 3 years ago, started becoming skeptical of the mRNA vaccines, the profit motives of pharma companies during the pandemic, and the concerning drift to authoritarian thought police all to build an “army” to combat allegations from over ten years ago by multiple women who happen to have some a tv interview but haven’t yet gone to the police.
Masterful!!!
It can’t be the war stuff right? Because he’s always been fervently anti war without much thought other than blowing up people is always bad.
I think Elon was always what I'd call "silicon valley libertarian" at best. Nothing he's said or done is really all that surprising, if you go back and look at the things he said and did 10 years ago.
Agreed. EVs and solar are generally considered "lefty" (unfortunately), and I can't think of anything he espoused outside of that which could be considered "liberal".
Elon Musk has greatly accelerated green energy innovation through EVs, battery technology, and solar. Are these actions appropriately described as "alt-right"?
When people today talk about Elon Musk's political views they mean his sudden right-wing radicalization in 2022 that happened exactly when he was tipped off about sexual harassment allegations coming his way.
Futuristic technology has certainly been right wing for as long as that has been a concept. Looking to history, some of the most incredible technological breakthroughs any of us can think of, came from what is considered the most extremely right wing society to have existed.
It’s pretty simple. If you have to be masculine and assertive in any way now you have to cowtow to the insane right because the left is a hostile space for regular men. The right welcomes you with open arms and basically shields you from any consequences for past wrongs. There is no middle. You can get away with just about anything on the right now with no repercussions.
You can downvote this all you want but you know there is more than a modicum of truth here.
I'm a regular man and currently feel a lot more comfortable within the milieu of mainstream liberals.
I honestly have no idea what people are on about when they say stuff like this about "a hostile space for regular men". Like, I just literally have no clue what you mean, no idea what in the world you might be talking about.
You know, regular men. Regular men who want what the 1950's was advertising. Loyal housewife, dinner on the table when you get home from work, reading the newspaper on the recliner totally undisturbed, kids not getting in the way of the sports broadcast or asking questions or requiring time commitment, leaving for the pub for hours with no notice, every-other-weekend fishing trips with the boys.
You know, regular men, who surround themselves with a family consisting of humans expected to behave like loyal-to-the-death dogs. They've earned it, and fo' fkn sho' they goin' collec'.
You know, regular men. Regular men who want what the 2020's was advertising. Neurotic "partners", Soylent on the table after you lock your work laptop, reading reddit on the sofa totally undisturbed, anti-natalist so kids not getting in the way of the Twitch broadcast or asking questions or requiring time commitment, leaving for your bull for hours with no notice, every-other-weekend Antifa riot with the fellow cucks.
You know, regular men, who surround themselves with no one but are still self-absorbed-to-the-death. They've earned it, and fo' fkn sho' they goin' collec'.
I'd argue that Aba & Preach do a good job of staying in the middle, for an example of YT content creators. They tend to shit on red pill extremists and champagne socialists with equal aplomb.
Better Bachelor? He's a MGTOW guy but pretty mild-mannered in his message. Talks about dystopian big tech and gender relations issues but isn't a foaming-at-the mouth loon.
Jimmy Dore? He's a hardcore leftist but spends most of his energy attacking corrupt and/or incompetent Democrats and the eternal-war monoparty fueled by the Military-Industrial Complex.
Honestly I've cut down my consumption of sociopolitical commentary a lot in the past year. I feel like most of the channels aren't saying things I don't already know, and having lived outside the US for 10+ years, don't directly affect me much.
Is it even "the algorithm" or is it simply just how people prefer to click crazy shit? We see it with news and pretty much anything else where clicks equal money.
I think the algorithm simply suffers the same problem as googles search algorithm: it was gamed years ago. I usually have to block a dozen or so of crazy or low effort content farms for every type of content I watch on youtube and after that the recommendations seem mostly acceptable.
"The algorithm" and/or the people behind it noticed that if User1 watches VideoA and then we show him B-C-D, he stays on the platform for 10 minutes.
BUT when we showed a User2 the videos X-Y-Z (after videoA), then User2 stayed "engaged" for 3 hours. And the new sequence was just established.
The 'machine' is constantly doing A/B and other tests, and it learns, adapts, and continues. The machine just learns what people like and feeds it to them. We can't blame the machine for giving the users what they want.. can we? :)
> Inevitably though, the algorithm steered the videos to become more clickbaity, divisive, and frankly crazy.
"The algorithm" didn't force him to go off the crazy deep end. He chose to do this himself. Don't absolve him or that decision.
I think it's more like, he knew this was coming out and it was going to make him look bad, so he preemptively decided to modify his audience to consist of people less likely to leave him once the news did break.
"I think it's more like, he knew this was coming out and it was going to make him look bad, so he preemptively decided to modify his audience to consist of people less likely to leave him once the news did break."
The accusations mainly seem to be from around a decade ago (give or take). How long do you have him down "modifying" his audience?
I personally think ... well I don't know the bloke at all, only his public persona. However we are seeing an outrageous pseudo trial by media (all of them) and ill-informed public "opinion" before he is even in the dock facing his accusers. How on earth can he face 12 unbiased jurors with this bloody nonsense going on?
Perhaps we should adopt a professional approach to trying crime, involving trained magistrates instead of the old school "12 men and true" bollocks. The jury system doesn't really cut it these days in the face of your and other shrill accusations. I gather that the Netherlands does that, for example.
The accusations are older, but they picked up a lot of steam recently to the point I'm sure he got a bunch of media inquiries asking for comment. That's what tipped him off that it was about to become a big deal and triggered his rightward shift (the accusations had never previously been a big deal affecting him).
> the algorithm steered the videos to become more clickbaity, divisive, and frankly crazy. He probably saw that outrage-bait videos were getting double the views. YouTube's algorithm plays a massive part in what goes into people's heads and they should be held more accountable.
I'm a YouTuber, and I want to be very clear on the above.
I know I would get way more views (and subscribers, and money) if I did more stupid clickbait stuff. But I don't want to, that doesn't make me happy. Also, professionals should not do that out of being professional.
A house painter would make more money if he did a rush job, and a TV reporter would get in the news more if he told blatant lies on live national TV. Just because a person can make more money short term doing something, it doesn't mean they should not take 100% of the blame for doing it.
I could very easily make videos of doing highly illegal stuff, which would likely get a zillion views. Am I then less responsible for doing it?
I see what your saying, but your examples don't quite work.
A reporter telling lies would presumable be called into their managers office and told to shape up or be fired. A painter doing rush jobs would get bad reviews and no referrals, and eventually stop getting jobs. Those behaviors are not incentivized.
A youtube creator milking the algorithm is rewarded for this behavior, with more views, more ad money, etc.
Are we really surprised that people are doing what they are incentivized to do?
> A reporter telling lies would presumable be called into their managers office and told to shape up or be fired.
I can't help but read this and feel like you must not be familiar with the UK press, particularly the tabloids. The UK tabloids make shit up all the fucking time with next to zero consequences.
For a more US centric take you might want to read Ryan Holiday's book "Trust Me I'm Lying: Confessions Of A Media Manipulator". He goes into specific detail about his time when he was in charge of marketing for American Apparel and how he got US media outlets to write completely bullshit stories for him and others clients like Tucker Carlson to get publicity. There's hardly anyone doing proper fact checking at a lot of these publications anymore, especially on smaller stories, because their print revenues have collapsed since the internet and they're desperately trying to stay afloat.
The painter example makes sense since his customers are his users, so the incentives are aligned.
The journalist is not like that. His users are the readers, but his customers are the advertisers. And if he is lying and gaining clicks and ad engagement, he is more likely to be called in by his boss for a promotion than a scolding.
A reporter telling lies with plausible deniability, like a manipulative headline clarified in the middle of the article, is actually expected. Some Youtubers at least are scumbags for real money
I think my examples do actually work well, in that the painter and the TV reporter ARE incentivized, short term to do those clickbait things, in exactly the same way YouTube creators are.
In all cases, reality will catch up to them, and in the long term they will be punished for what they did in the name of short term gains.
> A house painter would make more money if he did a rush job
If the way to find a painter is to use the yellow pages, and the order inside the yellow pages is by the time the to finish painting, most of the jobs will go to people that make a rush job, thus pushing painters into that direction.
The difference between questioning everything and rejecting everything from the mainstream is an important one which Brand and many others seem not to understand.
Oh, I think he understands. Constantly criticizing mainstream media for low standards while having far lower standards yourself is the kind of thing that you have to put significant ongoing effort into rationalizing.
Consumers of alt media can do it thoughtlessly. Producers? I'm not convinced.
How are we measuring that? Firstly, as a nitpick, the mainstream media these days is Russel Brand. He has an audience comparable to a group like CNN. Possibly slightly larger.
Secondly, the quality of the podcasters is generally better on net than the big media companies. They tend not to be gung-ho all-weather war supporters for example. People like Brand might get a lot of details wrong but have more coherent takes on big issues.
Thirdly, and related to secondly, the podcasters tend to take less money from big entrenched interests in the military-industrial complex or big pharma. They rely less on being spoon fed access to powerful people. It is easier to follow their incentives and style than work out what a media company is trying to push this week.
Journalism. Reaching out to involved parties for comment, boots on the ground, making retractions, reserving judgement, citing sources, seeking and contextualizing opposition and/or expertise, making an attempt to prefer observation over interpretation, pushing back on wild claims, etc etc etc.
I was acutely aware of partisan bias in MSM but I didn't appreciate just how much they actually did get right until the deluge of "MSM sux, here's what THEY don't want you to know" replaced it.
So you’re making assumptions of Brand’s content that you haven’t seen in years? What are you basing your assumptions on? What the journalists tell you? Seems like a pretty disingenuous take.
I would question your third point in the spirit of doubting narratives. This is the podcasters' narrative, but intuitively a podcaster has less scale and therefore is much cheaper to be incentivised towards specific narratives.
Oh, sure. It costs nothing to buy off a single podcaster. There are blatant shills all over the place.
Still better than cable news. CNN literally hired Clapper as a presenter - you couldn't pull a stunt like that the way most podcasts are structured. There'd have to many opportunities for people to press him on the Orwellean spy system that he helped set up. I don't recall any support for domestic mass surveillance among the US voting public.
Compare that to someone in the CIA buying off Joe Rogan - he might sell out some day, but if he got so bad he was offering softball interviews to the likes of Clapper then he's not going to be able to keep the same pull he does now. People have a distaste for that level of blatant propaganda.
Don't buy into the bad faith arguments. They aren't genuinely "asking questions," they're trying to bring what they already believe into the mainstream.
I forget where I read/saw it, but someone once made the point that because there are an infinite number of questions that can be asked, someone is always making some kind of statement based on a conscious decision about which questions to ask, and which not to ask.
I think this is especially true when someone is repeatedly ask the same kinds of questions while simultaneously ignoring lots of other really good questions.
Epistemologically you can't be completely sure, but when someone's discourse is habitually interwoven with rhetorical gambits and logical fallacies it's not unreasonable to conclude that they're actually a bullshit artist.
if you have a modern bar for accuracy, you require evidence. when you require evidence, because you've spotted a ton of lies in the media, most of it gets rejected.
we did not ask for untrustworthy media, algorithms, exploitation and bribery dictate that.
It's amusing they recognize NPCs that uncritically repeat the establishment narrative and question nothing, but don't recognize they are doing the same thing in reverse.
"I Support The Current Thing" vs "I Oppose The Current Thing"
It's time to end the YouTube monopoly, too much of this nonsense we have seen in the last few years, it's nothing but virtue signalling and pandering to one side without ascertaining facts.
24/7 365 "Breaking News" TV - AKA spin factories - complete with scrolling tickers and a combative talking head format (with programs that may or may not have actual trained journalists, but so-called experts at expressing their biased opinions) is the other huge driver.
That's pretty well understood though, right? If love and fear are primary drivers of engagement and fear is a stronger emotion than love then steering viewers to view things that upset them is in the best interest of the company that earns its revenue from keeping them engaged.
the money/power/fame are the drivers, the social media platforms open up the search for those things to a much wider audience while espousing the importance.
that is to say : social media isn't innocent, but it's a co-factor in the larger human-dominating infinite search for power and fame.
The swiftness of Youtube's action makes my head spin. /s
Brand was kicked off the BBC fifteen years ago, for his disgraceful on-air abuse of Andrew Sachs ("Manuel" from Fawlty) and his daughter. Since then, he's only become more extreme and objectionable.
Brand image is a complicated concept but it consists of a lot of different pieces over a long period of time that build a public perception. Often, good or bad brand images are not due to any one single thing, but the totality of things that the public knows about a brand.
While a single bad apple might not sink a brand, if it starts to become a pattern, it can ruin brand image over time.
If Tiger Woods was the only way Nike could think of advertising then they likely would've considered him worth keeping, but when they have so many alternative good options for sponsorships it tips the balance in favour of not sponsoring somebody that even 0.1% of your customers might think badly of you for.
The mainstream media are trying to frame the argument as Russell Brand is a sex offender and that his mainstream media critiques are thus null and void as a result. Personally, I find it more likely that he is both a sex offender* and he is also right about it being a targeted mainstream media attack. It's absolutely laughable seeing the BBC, The Guardian and particularly Channel4 amongst others trying to wash their hands of this when they practically encouraged all of this behaviour and created the 00s indie hedonistic culture from scratch with shows like Skins as well as encouraging his antics on Big Brother's Big Mouth.
It's weird reading all of this as someone who was a teenager from the era who idolised Brand and other indie scene figures like Pete Doherty. I remember reading about Brand dating Peaches Geldoff in the paper but didn't realise how young she was and how old he was in comparison. I think I assumed he was in his 20s and assumed she was in late teens or twenties based on the fact the tabloid press showed them stumbling out of nightclubs together and no-one seemed to be batting an eyelid. Though looking back I, and many others, were sneaking in to nightclubs all the time underage with fake IDs. It still goes on to this day and parents just seem to accept it as normal part of growing up and even a celebrated and encouraged rite of passage but maybe we should be having a more serious conversation about it. I don't go out anymore, but in my 20s bouncers definitely seemed to be taking checking IDs a lot more serious than they did when I was 17 so at least that's a start.
It wasn't uncommon in the 00s for school girls to be dating older guys who were no longer at school, Arctic Monkeys even wrote a song about it (Bigger Boys And Stolen Sweethearts) but someone over 30 dating a 16 year old definitely would have been considered weird and the fact the mainstream media wasn't batting an eyelid at it is damning. Why the Brand stuff is headline news but I've not seen a single mainsteam media article calling for the legal age to have sex to be raised to 18 is ridiculous. Teenagers are going to fuck regardless, but no-one is going to prosecute a 17 year old and a 15 year old having a relationship, and the police are smart enough not to waste time on an 18 year old and a 17 year old having a relationship but at least you then have a mechanism to protect 16 year olds from getting groomed like this. It also made me sad to find out that another of my indie heroes, Noel Fielding, was also doing the same thing - dating a 16 year old Pixie Geldoff when he was 33.
I'm not justifying any of Brand's actions, he has to take responsibility for what he's done especially if there was no consent, but he's quite obviously a people pleaser and he wouldn't have done half the stuff he did if it wasn't for the mainstream media and the culture they created around him. People are trying to use old videos of him flirting with celebrities on talkshows to damn him and disregarding the fact that the entire audience is laughing and clearly signalling that the culture at large was OK with what he was doing.
Stuff like Google demonetising Brand's videos just make me believe even more that at least some element of this is a targeted MSM culture war attack to take him down, even if a justified one. The problem is that at some point it's also going to take down people who don't deserve it - in fact it's no doubt already happened. I've read several mainstream articles where Jordan Peterson's ideas are completely misrepresented and character assassinated in a way that is completely unjustified. I agree with some of the things he says and I also disagree with others but there seems to be absolute no nuance or tolerance in the mainstream media any more, it's all tribalism - either you're good or you're bad and if you even agree with part of what one of the "bad" people say then you must be one of the bad ones. I honestly can't even debate any of Jordan Peterson's ideas with some people I know, even the ideas I dislike, because mentioning his name is like saying Voldemort and he's "The One Who Should Not Be Named".
Mainstream media outlets clearly have agendas and will go after people who speak out against them and will use anything at their disposal to do it. It's completely ridiculous.
*Obviously I would prefer for this to actually be settled in a court of law with evidence rather than public opinion, but the text message exchange and the rape clinic visit do look quite damning which is why I'm currently inclined to believe that at least that allegation is looking more likely than not on the face of it, even if some of the others turn out to be false.
In other words, he pissed off the wrong people for long enough for them to do something about it, or at least, he doesn't have any friends left to protect him form the allegations.
My opinion is, many of his followers will stick with him because he is a mesiah like figure to many and people will see this as some type of MSM, Establishment attack because he is revealing "the truth", top comment on YT:
Honestly, dude, it's surprising it has taken them this long to try and shut you down. For me, and many people who follow your content, it is just a sign that you are on the right track Stay strong, brother.
> Mainstream media outlets clearly have agendas and will go after people who speak out against them and will use anything at their disposal to do it. It's completely ridiculous.
And the non mainstream ones will do this even harder
I’d argue both do it at the the same intensity, but one is using a false veneer of prestige and respectability as a cloak to try and give itself a legitimacy it no longer deserves.
Well reasoned, well written, and I think you're probably correct in that it exists in both column A and column B in roughly equal measure.
I wish I hadn't read that about Noel Fielding. I love The Mighty Boosh.
It's fundamentally "weird" for someone with 33 years of life experience to be able to connect, in a relationship-context, to a 16 year old. Having said that, celebrity-adjacent 16 year-olds (ie. Pixie Geldoff) probably have more life experience (for better or more likely worse) than your random 16 year-old. Still way up on the "weird" scale though.
I too loved the Boosh growing up, and I would still laugh at most of it today. So far it’s managed to avoid the retroactive judgement that other shows have. Why that is I don’t know - is it because it was cult and niche, is it because those who know about it love the comedians and want to keep quiet, is it because they haven’t fallen foul of the power figures in the MSM? Off the top of my head, there’s blackface and the transgender Old Gregg sex predator that I’m surprised haven’t been called out much yet.
On some level there’s nothing wrong with the “I go by many names” bit - the blackface wasn’t really necessary other than the character was meant to be some kind of psychedelic guitarist and the most recognisable psychedelic guitarist was Hendrix. There wasn’t anything that was mocking black people, and there wasn’t really any stealing of a black person’s job because the whole humour of the Boosh was Noel, Julian and Rich playing all these different characters by themselves. It was like going to watch an improv group perform but on TV and with costumes.
I think a line needs to be drawn and each sketch of these comedy shows interpreted through a lens of intent. Is the underlying minority the butt of the joke or is it the character that is being mocked? If it’s the first, by all means denigrate it but if not it should be allowed to be made. There was a lot of uproar over the South Park transgender episode where a lot of people missed the point that South Park wasn’t mocking transgender people, it was mocking self interested characters like Cartman who will manipulate anything for their own advantage, such as pretending to be transgender so they can use the female bathroom. Unfortunately, I think Old Gregg probably falls into the other camp, as unless I’m missing something (and it’s been a while since I’ve watched it so I might be wrong), the “joke” seems to be that Old Gregg is a lonely transgender outcast that is flashing her “mangina” and trying to coerce people into sex.
All these culture war lines are both very ill defined and selectively enforced, which does nothing other than throw fuel on the fire that they are just tools that the MSM can use to retroactively cancel people that no longer serve them or are actively going against them. If there really isn’t this targeted agenda, the companies like YouTube either need to write clear guidelines and enforce them fully not just selectively, or alternatively drop the moral arbiter stance and instead take that of a museum or public library that exists solely as a container for artworks and lets the public be the judge. Anything else is hypocritical at best and malevolent public opinion manipulation at worst. Personally, I think they should take the public container route, because as soon as you start having an authority that is in charge of defining the culture, you’re on a very slippery slope that leads to authoritarianism. Taking down videos from platforms is the modern equivalent to book burning.
The main stream media loves to pretend it’s the hero and that it created the MeToo movement but it didn’t - the MeToo movement was created organically bottom up by women on Twitter. All the mainstream media did was capitalise on it after the fact to get clicks and eyeballs.
It is pretty clear considering his past behavior and own admissions to the effect he was lewd drug addict and turned a new leaf a few years back.
But justice must still take it's course - even decades later - the truth will no doubt come out during the investigation.
What is maddening is his cult on YouTube who did not bother to watch the documentary and the testimony of the accusers before jumping all in to defend him.
As a disclaimer, I’m not a Brand content consumer and I’m also not commenting on the validity of the claims.
I’m aware that he’s a popular populist and the slippery slope is obvious here, independent of the particulars of the specific case.
The playbook to silence a relatively loud political voice is now obvious from the YT response. It is a given that cynical actors on all sides will evolve to further exploit this strategy, especially so if accusers do not have to testify under oath.
YouTube, on a common sense basis, should have recognized that political reality today and tred more carefully — much more so than for a travel influencer, for example.
The long term game theory here, like brand boycotts, is hopefully that the exploitation of this strategy by all political players would lead to the strategy losing power due to general fatigue and whataboutisms.
I don't think "loud political voices" have the right to make money off of YT. YT seems generous to keep Brand on the platform during this odd period between accusation and conviction.
I’m not raising a question about his rights or generosity.
He and other independent political pundits have large audiences and as a result generate valuable content for the platform.
If the game theory above plays out and cynical actors act cynically, it will ultimately hurt YT in the long term run and drive users to other platforms (I’d assume Twitter).
I think YT may be opening a can of worms for themselves.
Personally I don't think YouTube should have any restrictions on who they let use their platform.
If I started a platform for Bluegrass musicians to upload their music and someone started uploading videos of shooting guns I should be able to cut them off without any interference at all.
And they should be able to start their own website that lets folks upload videos of people shooting their guns.
YouTube is pretty liberal in the range of content they allow. They didn't boot Brand off the platform, the just quit paying him for using it. That doesn't bother me a bit.
There apparently were letters sent by the UK Parliament to politely inquire if Brand is able to earn money on the recipient's platform. No requests or threats of course, oh no, just asking...
I think some of the things coming out of Russel Brand is lunacy, however I'm also 10000% against censorship. Youtube stepping against Russel Brand is virtue signalling at it's finest, when Russel Brand has not been convicted of any crimes. A small group of people can claim X did something evil against them, and Youtube will run with it blindly.
Off-topic, I think, writing this down to see if the logic is sound:
If YouTube can demonetise a content creator at the discretion of YouTube (because they can), then surely it follows that an individual can de-monetise a content creator at their own discretion (because they can).
A platform demonetising someone is surely of much greater impact than an individual doing it. A platform owns their platform, from which the content is being delivered and so their discretion is justification enough. An individual owns the hardware and bandwidth upon and through which the content is being played, and so their discretion is justification enough.
Am I performing the mental gynastics of denial to make that leap?
Part of the differentiation I'm making in using the word "discretion" is that it's not illegal content that's being demonetised. Agree or disagree or find it as morally reprehensible as you feel the need to, the content itself (the very thing being demonetised) is not illegal. And, in fact, had been happily monetised for the past however long.
Seems like there should be guidelines for what you can and cannot do to get YouTube monetization (that people can squabble over). Seems very ad-hoc to do it this way. It surprises me that being accused of a crime would be a good or fairly enforced rule.
For everybody in here who is building a startup and is unsure about going tpe to toe with a tech giant. Do not be intimidated, these big organizations are afraid of everything .
Favorable press and 'feel good statements' like this become more important than making money.
This is true for companies buying ads too, the big automotive companies would absolutely make a fortune both in terms of money and advertisement by having their officially licensed cars in the Grand Theft Auto series, but they are afraid because oohhh the car would be shown with damage, protagonists can shoot at it and from it, they can drive like maniacs killing pedestrians...
Automotive companies choose to license their cars in racing games like Forza or Gran Turismo for several reasons, while being more hesitant about the Grand Theft Auto series:
1. *Positive Representation*: Racing games are primarily about the celebration of cars, driving, and motorsport. Cars are shown in a positive light, focusing on their performance, design, and history. This aligns well with the image that car manufacturers wish to project.
2. *Brand Image*: Grand Theft Auto, while immensely popular, has themes of crime, violence, and other mature content. Car manufacturers might be hesitant about associating their brands with such content.
3. *Damage and Misuse*: In the GTA series, vehicles can be stolen, damaged extensively, used in criminal activities, or even destroyed. Such depictions might be unappealing to car manufacturers who want to maintain a certain prestige or image for their vehicles.
4. *Target Audience*: Racing games appeal to car enthusiasts and people interested in the automotive world, making them a fitting platform for car manufacturers to showcase their vehicles.
5. *Historical Precedence*: Racing games have a long history of featuring licensed cars, dating back many years. This has established a tradition and trust between game developers and car manufacturers.
6. *Feedback from Fans*: Fans of racing games often expect and appreciate the realism that comes with using licensed cars, whereas the GTA audience might not prioritize this as much.
While the potential exposure in a game like GTA might be vast, automotive companies must weigh the benefits against the possible damage to their brand image.
Seems like ad revenue should go into a trust, if he is found innocent it gets paid to him, if guilty it goes to victim compensation or related charity.
But if he stops publishing to YouTube that will be held against him. He puts out less shows or ad revenue drops due to boycott it will be spun as “Brand is stealing from his victims/charity” it seems extreme but these days someone will spin it such a way.
This is difficult for me. I'm not pro censorship, but I would like a way to not have to hear about Russell Brand at all. Is that possible?
I don't want to hear from him or about him. I don't want to hear from people that like him. I didn't want to hear Radio 4 talking about it this morning. I don't want to stop his free speech, I just want to avoid him
If only...I have never watched his videos or read about him. I don't read tabloid news. I don't watch TV news. I only listen to 'serious' radio news stations. Yet somehow I know all about this story
Because you aren't adherering to the above comment: you are reading stories about him, in fact you're also posting in the comment sections in said stories.
Sexual assault is a serious allegation. In most media channels if an employee is accused of sexual assault they would be stood down and an investigation launched. He’s lucky they’re still giving him a platform to use.
While sexual assault is serious if true, it's also the only crime that can ruin someone's life and livelihood with no evidence or actual crime taking place.
Additionally there is often large financial incentive for accusers (and their lawyers) via lawsuits and it serves as a fantastic method of hurting people politically even if they are exonerated.
> While sexual assault is serious if true, it's also the only crime that can ruin someone's life and livelihood with no evidence or actual crime taking place.
This is true. Along with this, it's important to note that there is, in fact, a significant amount of high-quality evidence about this particular allegation (some of which is contemporaneous to the assault itself).
I'd also note that failing to believe & punish a true/credible allegation is itself an abhorrent act. There's no easy defaults in a situation like this: it's A Very Bad Thing to be incorrect in either direction.
Records from a rape clinic one woman went to shortly afterwards, indirect witnesses (e.g., someone who heard one of the women screaming from outside Brand's home during the assault), and exchanges shortly after the fact alluding to the assault (including by Brand).
There are apparently many other allegations, but four have relevant supporting evidence.
There is even bigger financial incentive in general to shut up / deplatform an outspoken, high-profile leftist (as in a person who threatens profits), or a politician in general. So such accusations should be considered with caution.
Just like Johnny Depp and Amber Heard right? Oh wait Depp won, was awarded millions, everyone knew about it, and Amber Heard was mocked & laughed at until she faded off. Why doesn't Brand do what Depp did, if they are just making it all up?
What, are you expecting to do it, like, overnight? Depp's ordeal lasted years. I think in the end he got one million from Amber Heard, after losing maybe 50/ 80 million for movies he was removed from, plus the reputational damage, plus the psychological damage of being considered violent and abusive for years, plus having to go through two trials (one in England, at the end of which Heard's allegations were declared true), etc. Maybe Brand will do exactly what Depp did. But even if after years he turns out to be innocent, the damage- as in Depp's case- will never be undone.
Because they're not inherently lying. Brand has already admitted to banging one claimant who was 16 at the time. He's gross, but this extralegal retconning of all past sexual encounters needs to stop. It's pig-butchering by another name.
The excuses for not filing a police report of rape at the time rarely withstand scrutiny. The aggrieved have no problems broadcasting their story on social media, but have every excuse prepared for why they can't formally document it within the statute of limitations in a venue that imposes consequences for lying. Go figure.
Heard and Depp were a shitshow though. When two actors take the stand against each other, neither can be trusted. Michael Jackson is a better example.
Yeah, whenever I mistakenly use the ad-ridden normal youtube app / website, I'm inundated with ads for investment scams and get-rich-quick-selling-ebooks-on-amazon scams and various other things that just would not pass television advertising standards. It's so strange that this is some kind of acceptable default behaviour.
Anonymous allegations from more than a decade ago, procured by a fishing reporter, should not lead to the cancellation of someone's means of supporting themselves. This is absurd, regardless of whether the accusations are ultimately true or not. Beyond the absurdity, this is tyrannical.
Even the "testimony" they released was recorded by an actor. There's simply very little of substance here.
Do any of us know what percentage of his income is from YouTube currently?
I think the point stands in the abstract. It doesn't even matter for him specifically, because there are people whose income is primarily/entirely from YouTube.
And so we should appreciate what a serious action that is, to turn it off. It's not like it's just play money, that we can pretend it doesn't matter. It's real income.
The Guardian estimates that he makes a little over a million a year from his YouTube videos.
If your sole source of income comes from YouTube, a private enterprise you freely chose to contract and enter into a binding agreement with which affords them the right to do this, then this is a risk you run.
Brand, like everyone, is free to monetise his content on platforms with different perspectives on acceptable creator conduct, or to monetise his content directly. The specific transaction which he is entering into with YouTube is that he will benefit from their large audience viewing his videos, and if people watch those videos, YouTube and he will benefit from advertising running against the videos. Brand does not have any de facto right to broadcast to YouTube's audience, which I would imagine they consider to be proprietary and valuable -- exactly the sort of thing you wouldn't want, for example, associating your brand with individuals credibly accused of rape.
> And so we should appreciate what a serious action that is, to turn it off. It's not like it's just play money, that we can pretend it doesn't matter. It's real income.
It's a serious course of action but that does not mean it's unfair on Brand. He was already warned when he -- a standup comedian with identical bona fides to a goldfish -- espoused discredited unscientific nonsense during COVID. It was fair then, and it's fair now.
He is not dependent on YouTube to support himself even if 100% of his income today comes from YouTube.
He could get banned from all social media and he would still be able to support himself.
Any party to a transaction should be able to revoke consent to the transaction at any time with or without cause.
If you are a programmer and you work for me and I fire you, I have not destroyed your ability to support yourself. I've only removed your ability to do business with me.
There are people whose main income is YouTube and if YouTube can do this to famous people, surely they can do it to smaller creators who are paying their bills with YouTube money.
Don't be confused by the situation and the precedent it establishes.
The precedent has already been established well before YouTube made this decision.
In most places in the US you can lose your livelihood for any reason or no reason at all, safe for protected classes.
I’d rather see this energy be used to end fire at will and protect employees in general from losing their livelihood on a whim than to use this to pander to celebrities with questionable pasts under the guise of “it could happen to you!”
Losing one job is not remotely close to losing your livelihood.
They didn't saw off his hands, they demonetized him. He can go do stage shows or wash dishes or something if he wants to eat. He's famous and popular, he has a million ways of making an income.
People are acting like YouTube robbed him of something he was owed. They did no such thing.
>Don't be confused by the situation and the precedent it establishes.
There are times it is very difficult to not be inflammatory on hacker news. Statements like this saying some new precedent is being set are are wild. Like have we even been on the same planet up till this point levels of cognitive dissonance.
Last week if the local paper would have written an article about one of one your co-workers being accused of sexual assault on a minor, and that the company "released them from duties the next day", you would have told me "Oh, that's the way it's always been, you don't want a rapist working for the company". In any right to work state accusations of impropriety are enough to terminate work contracts, end of story. But suddenly someones golden cow got tarnished and now we want something done?
Your comment seems either mistaken or disingenuous to me:
> Anonymous allegations
The identity of the alleged victims is not public, but that is not the same thing as an anonymous allegation. The newspaper and television channel know the identities of the individuals, as does Brand.
> from more than a decade ago
Utterly irrelevant.
> procured by a fishing reporter
It's unclear what you mean by this. I can't find anything in any of the stories which suggests that the journalists simply began investigating him hoping to find a story or promulgate the misapprehension that he is a rapist. In fact, the Times' investigation seems to insinuate that the 16 year old Brand was dating when he was 31 approached his publisher seeking an apology before being rebuffed. That seems to me to be the most likely origin for the investigation.
> should not lead to the cancellation of someone's means of supporting themselves
Suspension without pay is extremely common whilst investigations of serious misconduct in or outside of the workplace are carried out, but even if that weren't the case: YouTube is not Brand's employer, he chooses to publish on their platform [presumably] knowing the terms of service, and is not beholden to YouTube as his only source of income. After he was "censored" by YouTube during COVID for espousing inane conspiratorial drivel, he began posting on a service called "Rumble", not to mention the royalties and residuals he still receives from his previous work and of course not forgetting his option to use one of his myriad other platforms (or indeed YouTube's, if it's within the ToS) to encourage his brainless fans to remunerate him directly or via other means.
> This is absurd
Even your straw man retelling of this situation is fairly benign-seeming.
> this is tyrannical
Lol.
> Even the "testimony" they released was recorded by an actor.
You could be forgiven for not knowing this if you get all of your news from Elon and Russell Brand, but it is absolutely the de facto standard in journalism to protect the identity of individuals with a mixture of actors and altered voices. If you watch the Channel 4 documentary you will note that at times they use the real people, with altered voices, and at times they use actors.
None of this undermines the credibility of the reporting or the accusations, and -- again -- the identities of the individuals in the reporting are known to both the journalists and Brand, and the police know the identity of the _further_ individual who came forward in light of the allegations to make _another_ accusation.
There’s been so, so many of these accusations in the past decade that turned out to be far less than the initial reporting or flat out wrong. Your deference to the professionalism of journalism is about a decade or two out of touch with modern reality.
It is only rational to wait for proper processes play out.
It’s sad that such a thing has become politicized where one has to feel the need to tar and feather someone at the first reporting of accusations and any dissent of immediate overreactions is dismissed as conspiratorial or itself motivated by a distasteful political agenda or merely getting their information from unclean sources.
> There’s been so, so many of these accusations in the past decade that turned out to be far less than the initial reporting or flat out wrong.
This is an illusory rebuttal. You seem to be insinuating that history shows there to be a significant chance that these accusations will be "far less" than the initial reporting "or flat out wrong", without providing any evidence in support of your claim.
> Your deference to the professionalism of journalism is about a decade or two out of touch with modern reality.
Here is a list of all the times I mentioned "journalism" or "journalists" in my post which you replied to. I would be grateful if you would enumerate which makes you think I am affording undue deference to the profession, bearing in mind that OP is suggesting that the media concocted this story and that the use of "actors" in its retelling is somehow evidence of its incredibility:
1. "[These are not anonymous allegations.] The newspaper and television channel know the identities of the individuals, as does Brand."
2. "I can't find anything in any of the stories which suggests that the journalists simply began investigating him hoping to find a story or promulgate the misapprehension that he is a rapist."
3. "In fact, the Times' investigation seems to insinuate that the 16 year old Brand was dating when he was 31 approached his publisher seeking an apology before being rebuffed. That seems to me to be the most likely origin for the investigation."
4. "it is absolutely the de facto standard in journalism to protect the identity of [the victims of serious crimes] with a mixture of actors and altered voices."
> It is only rational to wait for proper processes play out.
I'm sorry if you thought I was suggesting that "proper processes" were not playing out. In fact, I believe that private businesses which entered into contractual relationships with Brand are free to use the rights those contracts afford them to distance themselves from him, given the seriousness of the allegations against him.
> It’s sad that such a thing has become politicized
It isn't political except to say that the people defending Brand appear to be, overwhelmingly, fringe and far right figures who espouse similarly discredited views and are now joining dots which most of us don't see: this is not an endorsement of Brand's guilt, but Occam's Razor suggests that a man who bragged for decades about his relentless and at times violent sexual appetites, and who is accused of rape by multiple independent accusers with – again – reams of evidence _including a series of messages from Brand in which he appears to apologise for raping one of them_ is, simply, a rapist who happens to have the same nonsense views as a lot of those supporting him.
> one has to feel the need to tar and feather someone at the first reporting of accusations and any dissent of immediate overreactions is dismissed as conspiratorial
If you believe that the credibility of investigative journalism is in some way undermined by the use of actors to protect the identities of victims, or that a decade passing between the alleged crimes and the victims coming forward is suggestive of anything other than it being very, very scary and humiliating to come to terms with and be open about being raped, then you deserve to be dismissed in the harshest possible terms. It's simply another conspiracy theory masquerading in a not-very-compelling disguise.
> or itself motivated by a distasteful political agenda or merely getting their information from unclean sources.
That's what it boils down to, though. Assuming, for example, that you do not believe the earth to be flat, you have to rationalise and account for the fact that there are people who do sincerely believe it to be. My armchair assessment of such individuals is that they are probably somewhat predisposed to such beliefs (in my experience it's a rare thing to find a conspiracy theorist who believes just _one_… for example OP seems to be supporting Brand's discredited fringe theories about big pharma, and now believes the equally inane and vanishingly unlikely theory that Brand is being falsely accused in order to silence him), but also that their faith in the public institutions which overwhelmingly do more good than harm (serious news organisations, public bodies such as NIH and the WHO, colleges, etc.) has been eroded to the point where they seek out laughably ill-informed "news" sources like Brand and Rogan.
You have a whole lot of words here and are making a lot of claims and provide no evidence. This story is still way too early to say whether any allegations have substance or not, but one of your claims was:
> In fact, the Times' investigation seems to insinuate that the 16 year old Brand was dating when he was 31 approached his publisher seeking an apology before being rebuffed. That seems to me to be the most likely origin for the investigation.
When I Google ‘why is Russell Brand being investigated now’ I get this in one of the first results[0]:
> The women said that they only felt ready to tell their stories after being approached by reporters, with some citing Brand's newfound prominence as an online wellness influencer as a factor in their decision to speak.
This directly contradicts what you said, and I can see why others think you’re giving deference to the media. If you have a source for your claim I’d be glad to revise my stance.
I don’t know what the truth of the matter is, but after hearing Russell Brand admit openly to a lot of gross stuff, it seems like he’s not trying to hide anything here. I’ve also seen accounts from other women who have completely different stories about how he did not mistreat them (and they spoke openly without having actresses speak for them).
All that to say, it’s still way too early to say anything one way or the other. But blindly trusting that the media has no agenda seems unwise.
Just for fun, here's an unabridged list of the "claims" I made in the post you replied to:
1. That the parent did not provide any evidence in support of their claims.
2. That I believe YouTube is correct in its treatment of Brand.
3. That the people supporting Brand appear to be overwhelmingly fringe and far right figures who espouse similar views.
4. That the credibility of investigative journalism is in no way undermined by the protection of sources.
5. That OP seems to be supporting Brand's discredited conspiracy theories about big pharma.
Which of these do you think requires substantiation?
> one of your claims was […]
You then go on to quote something which specifically begins with "[the journalists report] seems to insinuate…".
This is obviously entirely subjective, but if you've read the report you'll recall the following:
1. This was a 2-3 year long investigation,
2. The then-16 year old Brand is accused of having groomed approached his publishers _independently_ of the journalists in 2020 seeking an apology for his behaviour, and was rebuffed,
3. The journalists then approached the publishers in 2023 and after investigation they severed ties with him and apologised.
The wording The Times used was very careful and I believe, based on my subjective experience of knowing a handful of investigative journalists very well, that in a situation where the then-16 year old girl approached the journalists and instigated the investigation they carried out, she would be protected in exactly this manner.
Investigative journalism, like police work, does not begin with the aim of taking someone down. Sources, tips, rumours, and allegations are investigated.
But let's say for a second that I grant you these women were approached by the journalists, rather than coming forward. You still have all your work ahead of you to explain how the journalists managed to find the handful of people willing to fake reams of evidence (again: text messages from Brand, or someone using his telephone number, apologising for raping someone; the 16 year old girl's family on the record as having witnessed his predation; the woman he allegedly raped having both worked with him and having sought emergency medical care and months of therapy as a rape victim) about this specific man whilst not receiving anything in return: they are not selling their story to a tabloid for 5 minutes of fame, their identities have been protected both because it affords them a degree of privacy in the face of humiliating allegations (and the vitriol of conspiracy theorists online), and because it lends them credibility as people not seeking payment.
Let's say that the journalists began investigating Brand after they overheard someone in a pub saying "I heard Russell Brand dated a 16 year old at one point". This does not undermine the credibility of the reporting, or the alleged victims' testimony, or in any way justify the comment I was replying to, which suggested that specifically because the anonymity of the alleged victims was protected, the reporting is not credible.
So for the purposes of this discussion let's say that yes, the journalists approached the girls. What difference does it make? How in any way does that give undue deference to the journalists?
> This directly contradicts what you said
It does not. I read this, and it is incorporated into my perspective that it is likely the then-sixteen year old approached the journalists.
> I don’t know what the truth of the matter is, but after hearing Russell Brand admit openly to a lot of gross stuff, it seems like he’s not trying to hide anything here.
I don't purport to be a master logician or anything, but if you sincerely believe that the alleged perpetrator's perceived transparency about "a lot of gross stuff" goes any way towards impugn multiple independently corroborated accusations with documentary evidence, then I think we're probably done here. Do you know of many rapists who have publicly confessed to their crimes unbidden?
What a completely fatuous line of thought.
> I’ve also seen accounts from other women who have completely different stories about how he did not mistreat them (and they spoke openly without having actresses speak for them).
Just so I have this straight: there are women Brand did not mistreat who are willing to speak without having their identities protected, and you think that this diminishes the credibility of the several women claiming that Brand _did_ sexually assault them?
Simple question: do you understand why it is de rigueur for the privacy of the victims of sexual assault to be protected during broadcasts? I don't mean to be rude but saying "women he didn't mistreat don't hide their names!" to refute the testimony of alleged rape victims too upset or afraid to have their identities made public is perhaps the stupidest thing anyone, anywhere, has ever said.
Endlessly fulminating on this is useless. The investigation is ongoing: all the facts are not yet known. If there is a case, let it go to trial. Let the truth come to light. Do not be so quick to judge.
It's very difficult to referee other people's discussion without appearing churlish, but I'm sincerely grateful to you for trying. A central facet to the entire debate here is the unlikelihood of a trial, in tandem with the seemingly overwhelming evidence. I have not judged Brand to be guilty, but I have concluded that it is more likely that he is guilty of these crimes than the various theories in this thread suggesting that he is being unfairly canceled because of his opinions about vaccines.
> I have concluded that it is more likely that he is guilty of these crimes than the various theories in this thread suggesting that he is being unfairly canceled because of his opinions about vaccines
I agree, but that isn't enough. The presumption of innocence is important. In the unlikelihood of a trial even more so.
> seemingly overwhelming evidence
Things aren't always what they seem, and sometimes they are.
It's conceivably relevant to you, but when weighing the credibility of a claim and/or an accuser, it is irrelevant -- except as a means of assessing that the person who believes it to be relevant is uninformed.
Here's why in general terms: NSVRC estimates that 63% of all sexual assaults are not reported to the police. You likely know the reasons for this, but just in case: fear of not being believed, low prosecution/conviction rates, frequently insurmountable burden of proof given the specific nature of most rapes, the fear of an extended criminal trial, victims blaming themselves or in some cases (including one of Brand's accusers) not wanting to admit that they were raped (easier when many violent sexual assaults are not the cartoon example of a man in a balaclava in the park, but someone you know and had previously trusted).
I presume that you accept that there are, in general, many women who are raped and simply do not come forward, and that the passing of time in such cases does not in any way diminish their claim?
More specifically, in California, the law reflects this uneasy reality for victims: from 2017 onwards, there is no statute of limitations on rape accusations. It's not possible for the criminal standard of proof to be changed to account for the fact that, axiomatically, rapes are difficult to prove, therefore the state grants an unlimited amount of time to come forward, which gives prosecutors the benefit of being able to build the most robust case possible.
Proving criminal actions beyond reasonable doubt literally means that the court/jurors find the evidence so compelling that no reasonable person could conclude anything other than guilt. And in a similar fashion, California's penal code seems designed to say that no reasonable person could find a decade passing between a rape and the victim coming forward as relevant to the credibility of the claims.
It's simply settled at this point: coming forward about a rape is a brutally unfair, hard, and thankless task. That's why the vast majority of victims do not come forward. That's why it's important that we understand what it means to "believe women": it doesn't mean that we abandon legal principles and convict men at the whim of their accusers, it means that we collectively create an environment in which the victims of serious, life-deranging, deeply personal, embarrassing, hard-to-prosecute crimes are not given yet another reason to do nothing by people who don't seem to understand that there are vastly fewer false accusations of rape than there are unreported ones. It needs to work the other way around.
Andrew Tate has been indicted on charges of rape, human trafficking, and forming an organised crime group to sexually exploit women. He is by his own admission a violent misogynist and, in his own words, "probably 40% of the reason" he moved to Romania was the perceived ease of evading rape charges there: "I'm not a rapist, but I like the idea of just being able to do what I want. I like being free." That's the same Romania which is known as one of the sex trafficking capitals of the world.
Given that there are many many more individuals with similar credentials (i.e. - none) doing the "just asking questions" schtick about vaccines, Ukraine, big pharma, etc. who have not been accused of rape or criminally indicted, why do you think that two people -- who constantly and openly discuss their predatory behaviour -- and have multiple accusers with independent witnesses, and documentary evidence, are being "silenced" for not conforming to the status quo?
It's self-evidently more likely that these are two predators who happen to truck in conspiracy theories, and they've been caught. Plenty of morons abound on Rumble and elsewhere, and frankly Tate and Brand's audience is nowhere near large enough (or, honestly, intelligent enough) that any government or organisation would orchestrate a fabricated "take down" to silence them.
I can tell that you're a conspiracy theorist, so let me state it plainly: very few people care about what you think as much as you do, and nobody holds your idols in the sort of esteem which would necessitate them being deliberately silenced for their opinions about "war/ukraine" or "pfizer/moderna".
> Also, consider that the ones that are silenced we are not hearing about and from.
I agree, and find this heartbreaking. I remember reading the accusations against Bill Clinton which, like those against Brand, were independent of one another, made by credible victims who did not know each other, supported by witnesses, and -- like Brand -- included similar patterns of behaviour from attack to attack (Clinton, if I recall, had a predilection for biting the faces and lips of the women he assaulted).
And then those women watch as Hillary Clinton uses her platform to discredit them in the cruellest possible terms.[^1] I wish those weeping and tearing their clothes for Brand as he is "silenced" would consider what it must be like to truly be silenced. Not just "my $1m a year YouTube income stream is gone"-silenced, but silenced by the fear of people like OP reflexively treating them with disdain and pretending they're part of some establishment plot.
It's on the same continuum as going into a pizza restaurant with a gun because it's a Democrat pedophile hub. Lunatics.
[^1] Although on Clinton it's worth noting that when his VP Al Gore was asked at a press conference whether he (Gore) thought the accusations were credible, he gave a wishy-washy answer. The journalist replied "You could just have said you don't believe them," to which Gore – astonishingly – replied: "I didn't say that," before going on to enumerate how any crimes Clinton may have committed were balanced out by his record of public service?!
> The journalist replied "You could just have said you don't believe them," to which Gore – astonishingly – replied: "I didn't say that," before going on to enumerate how any crimes Clinton may have committed were balanced out by his record of public service?!
Is there anywhere I can read about this? I tried feeding this into Google with quotes and got no results.
Here you go. The transcript is of a town hall meeting Gore held in Derry, New Hampshire, on 14th December 1999.
KATHERINE PRUDHOMME: When Juanita Broaddrick made the claim, which I found to be quite credible, that she was raped by Bill Clinton, did that change your opinion about him being one of the best presidents in history? And do you believe Juanita Broaddrick's claim? And what did you tell your son about this?
AL GORE: [Nervous laughter] Well, I don't know what to make of her claim, because I don't know how to evaluate her story, I really don't.
[…]
GORE: I didn't see it. There have been so many personal allegations and such a non-stop series of attacks, I guess I'm like a lot of people in that I think enough is enough. I do not know how to evaluate each one of these individual stories. I just don't know. I would never violate the privacy of my communication with one of my children, a member of my family, as for that part of your question--
PRUDHOMME [I slightly misremembered this part - apologies - but it doesn't change the substance]: So you didn't believe Juanita Broaddrick's claim?
GORE: No, I didn't say that. I said I don't know how to evaluate it, and I didn't see the interview. But I must say something else to you about this. Why don't you just stand back up, I'd like to look you in the eye. I think whatever mistakes Clinton made in his personal life are in in the minds of most Americans balanced against what he has done in his public life as president.
--
He then goes on to talk about his religious faith helping him to understand that "all of us are heirs to the mistakes that–are prone to the mistakes that flesh is heir to".
It's one of the most unsettling moments in American political history IMO.
When YouTube does this it means that they tacitly endorse the behaviour of everyone who is currently monetised at the moment. I’m sure it would be easy to find many monetised channels with similar allegations as well as people who have actually been convicted of crimes.
Edit: for example, someone like Chris Brown is convicted of domestic abuse as well as accused of many other incidents. He appears to be monetised on youtube.
>If a creator's off-platform behaviour harms our users, employees or ecosystem, we take action.
So why does this apply to Russell Brand but not to Chris Brown who is convicted of violence against another YouTube user? It must mean that youtuber endorses the behaviour and criminal activity of Chris Brown.
I think "endorse" is far too strong of a word. No, YT isn't "endorsing" Chris Brown.
But it certainly raises the question of YT being arbitrarily punitive. Rather than endorsing, it ignores certain allegations while demonetizing others.
It’s never been that arbitrary at YouTube though. Pretty easy to spot patterns. It’s very obvious that it’s a small motivated human group doing this, not just a faceless process protecting their profits using some hyper capitalist risk projection with advertisers, where the news cycle comes in and the outputs go out.
Because chris brown isn’t making anti-establishment content. It’s selectively applied and curiously both the accusations (10+ years old) and this fallout occur right around the start of election season.
If his content was on the other side of the aisle he’d be defended not demonetized.
So has the internet completely done away with innocent until proven guilty?
The primary benefit of things like MeToo was supposed to be people being able to take action against individuals who otherwise would have been expected to squash things due to undue influence on law enforcement, the media, and politics - like Harvey Weinstein.
But in cases like this, it seems quite dystopic that a D-list celeb, likely with little to no major influence, is suddenly getting completely cancelled across an entire swath of avenues and platforms, based solely on accusations.
"innocent until proven guilty" only applies in a court of law. Similar to when people cite the 1st amendment in situations where a private company is taking action, this phrase is meaningless here. A private company can do what it wants within the bounds of the law.
> "innocent until proven guilty" only applies in a court of law.
“Innocent until proven guilty” is a philosophical concept that many legal systems subscribe to in the context of criminal law.
> Similar to when people cite the 1st amendment in situations where a private company is taking action
Indeed, it’s very similar in the sense that the concept of the freedom of speech goes way beyond the 1st amendment. It existed before it. And it is the first amendment that exists because of the freedom of speech, not the other way round.
> A private company can do what it wants within the bounds of the law.
Yeah, including immoral actions that others may disagree with.
The whole philosophical backing of both "freedom of speech" and "innocent until proven guilty" is that the government doesn't itself have civil rights, only the rights explicitly outlined to it in the founding documents of that government (e.g. US Constitution).
Once you venture into private parties evaluating other private parties, you encounter a collision of rights. It's still freedom of speech and association to not want to do business with certain people, and as long as those certain people aren't of a protected class, this falls well within the moral concepts of both free speech and presumption of innocence.
Let's go more extreme. Tech companies are free to not host Nazi content. The US govt is NOT free to lock someone up for being a Nazi. That's the power of the 1st amendment.
Why can I never find you 'Corporations are people' advocates when corporate manslaighter is being discussed, for example when Boeing killed 200 people with a faulty plane?
Thanks for making the correction, luckily we don’t live in a world based purely on Lockean principles, but rather a practical one with a society much larger than existed in his day.
John Locke is renowned for being pragmatic, not an ideologue. I'm not sure why societal size would matter, but he lived in a period of social upheaval with lots of negative effects from intolerance and partisanship. Not really that different from today.
> Yeah, including immoral actions that others may disagree with.
The morality in this instance does not follow this principle. If people find these allegations credible—and most should—the morally correct action is to deplatform him and delete his content.
> If people find these allegations credible—and most should
Why should most people find these allegations credible? I do not believe there is a police report, arrest, and let alone a trial. These are currently just allegations, their credibility has not been adjudicated.
One might evaluate the situation based on what I think is called a "preponderance of evidence", combined with an understanding that the legal system is both slow and tends towards innocence unless a crime is proven "beyond a shadow of a doubt".
A person may know how slow and different a legal decision is compared to what may be obvious and a reflection of reality, and therefore might arrive at a conclusion well before a system designed to be conclusive would.
The law is more about what can be proven than it is about what is true, and for people who know that, legal judgement stands separately from moral evaluation.
What evidence has been provided to meet this preponderance of evidence standard you are putting forward for moral evaluation?
You have one party making an allegation claiming they have documents to back it up and the other party denying innocence with claims of their own exculpatory evidence. Nothing has been shared to the public by either party for me evaluate who has the preponderance of evidence.
I do believe YouTube (or any other private platform) can and should be able to set it's own rules for participation so I see no issue with what they did here. If it's a right for someone to be on that platform then we should not be relying on a private party to guarantee that and make the necessary legislative changes.
I would just love to understand why I should be outraged at this individual before anything has been presented before me so that I can evaluate for myself.
> ...to what may be obvious and a reflection of reality
And how exactly is it obvious that the guy is guilty? Just because he makes click-baity divisive videos, might allegedly have been a playboy in the past, and you don't like him, doesn't equate to "obviously he must have done it".
> "innocent until proven guilty" only applies in a court of law
No, it doesn't "only" apply in a court of law. I choose to apply it in my own psyche (which breaks the "only"), and I choose to do so because I understand the reasons why a court of law applies the principle.
Just because the whole village is wielding pitchforks doesn't mean it's rational for you to also do the same.
They used it in the context of the question whether "we, the internet" have done away with it. So clearly it never referred to the legal system, and diverting to that is just kicking up sand to not let the people who are interested discussing the question as it was asked discuss it in peace.
How do you propose this actually work out? Every time youtube, twitter, facebook, etc wants to ban someone they have to submit a request to the government or be subject to its oversight? That's far more dystopian.
Personally, I wouldn't mind if the judicial branch was in charge of arbitration.
These companies are not obligated to pay creators. They pay them because it's profitable, and the moment money exchanges hand and someone livehood depends on them, the relationship changes.
At that point, if you leave creators without recourse, you only changed labels and left workers without hundreds of years worth of labor rights thrown down the toilet.
This is a good point that I don’t see very often. Video producers who have an explicit (or even an implicit) agreement with YouTube and depend financially on the earnings that it provides are not just “creators” who can “go somewhere else”. Surely, one could say that to any worker: don’t like the job? Go somewhere else. And still we have fought so hard for labor rights that give employees more agency and some level of protection against abuse.
Makes me think whether receiving regular earnings from any online service should legally redefine the relationship between the user and the service to something closer resembling an employment contract.
You say this as a person with no fear of getting unpersoned when the wind changes, or a cosmic ray flips a bit. It never happened to you and you don't have empathy for the wide range of people it happens to (some of them as innocent as snow), so you don't quite have the fear of it in your bones. Until you're the one to get unpersoned, and then it's too late.
Aren't they still publishing his content, just not running ads and paying? The US government will do fuckall about that, even if platforms are forced to be quasi-national entities subject to the First Amendment.
Or alternatively companies have to provide clear and explicit rules about what is permissible on their platform and if you feel you're wrongly censored or removed from the platform you should be able to take legal action.
I'm fine with YouTube not wanting to provide a platform for people who they feel are harmful, but they need to define that in an explicit way so that these decisions are not made arbitrarily.
I believe primary Brand's job for the last few years has been as a content creator. Given this I think it's reasonable to expect he should have some legal rights. Personally I don't see a huge amount of difference between an Uber gig worker and a YouTube content creator. Both should have some basic rights regardless of whether they're technically classed as "employees".
Define "clear and explicit rules". Does the constitution of say United States qualify as examples of clear and explicit rules? If yes, then even after roughly a quarter millennium, there are still hundreds of thousands of cases filed each year.
I don't need to define it. It would be open to reasonable interpretation.
If an online platform creates an unclear or vague rule and use that rule to remove a user, then that user could pursue legal actions. If a court agrees that the rule (or rules) used to remove the user from the platform is unclear or too vague from the perspective of a reasonable person then the platform would need to pay out for their mistake.
Therefore it would be in their interest to ensure they have clear and explicit rules.
I don't think this is hard and we shouldn't pretend it is. It's just regulators in the West rather force Apple adopt USB-C and destroy E2E than than protect us from arbitrary corporate censorship.
If by "rules" you mean vague references to "harm" then sure.
My use of the word "explicit" here was intentional. As it stands the "rules" may as well just read "if we don't like what you're doing on or off our platform we reserve the right fire you as a content creator". And again I'll note, if you're fired as a content creator for some arbitrary reason you have no way to challenge the decision.
I don't think this is acceptable. I think Google should ultimately be able to run their platform however they like, but they have a responsibility to make those rules clear when people are dependant on them for their income.
Usenet was a set of fiefdoms mostly administered by academics in CompSci departments, and proved utterly unequal to its first real crisis*. Distributed systems work great as long as they're new and everyone is participating in good faith most of the time. In adversarial situations, they're rarely able to adapt flexibly enough, partly because the networked structure imposes a severe decision-time penalty on consensus formation. A negligent or malicious attacker just has to overwhelm nodes with high betweenness centrality and the whole network fails.
Immediately following crises everyone talks about making the network more resilient and so on, but it never fully recovers because everyone intuitively knows that establishing consus is slow and bumpy, and that major restructuring/retooling efforts are way easier to accomplish unilaterally. So people start drifting away because unless there's a quick technical fix that can be deployed within a month or two, It's Over. Distributed systems always lose against coherent attackers with more than a threshold level of resources because the latter has a much tighter OODA loop.
Exactly, and look what happened to Usenet. People abused the commons and we lost it to spam. Unmoderated networks always fall to bad actors.
I'm building a p2p social network and struggling hard with how to balance company needs, community needs, and individual freedom. A free-for-all leads to a tyranny of structurelessness in which the loudest and pushiest form a defacto leadership that doesn't represent the will of the majority. On the flip side, overly restrictive rules stifle expression and cause resentment. These are hard questions and there is no one answer, except that unmoderated networks always suck eventually, so the question is one of line drawing and compromise.
This is such a common thing for people to say I have to wonder if it's propaganda from big corporations. The idea that core tenets of our civilisation are invalid because "it's a private company" is insane. These principles are based on practicalities, not technicalities.
There's this really neat section of law known as administrative law. One of the tenants is that you are allowed to have pretty much any rule that you want to have but you have to apply it in a reasonably impartial and fair manner. This means, you can setup random rules that you enforce capriciously.
It doesn't have to apply everywhere but it's still a good policy in a lot of contexts. I think a massive general audience platform is a good example. If this were, let's say, an online community of survivors of abuse, maybe that sort of prudence could reasonably take a back seat.
Even then it’s a rather unfortunately named legal principle.
It would’ve been better for it to be called “not-guilty until proven guilty” since criminal courts aren’t in the business of establishing innocence nor do they have the power to declare someone innocent.
But I guess that doesn’t roll as nicely off the tongue.
Then let’s change the law. It’s obvious over the past few years that companies can’t be trusted with freedom of association or freedom of speech. Let’s strip them of both.
If you are incorporated (and therefore benefit from government-provided protection from liability and lower tax rates) then you no longer get to choose your customers; you’re a common carrier and must provide the same service to all customers. You can only terminate a customer for non-payment (if you’re a paid service) or if the customer takes actions that directly threaten your business (eg attempts to hack your service).
Social media companies may no longer promote or suppress content; they can only provide tools to let users do so themselves (eg filter/block/subscribe/tag). Advertisers can use similar filters for ad placement.
In the beginning YouTube was popular and had very little moderation. You could watch illegal streams of many films and movies and you could find some porn before it’d be taken down.
Advertisers are what demand moderation not users so as to protect their bottom line. It’s disingenuous to say otherwise and ignores a multitude of services that became and still are incredible popular with little moderation.
>YouTube was popular and had very little moderation.
Emphasis on the AND. There is some correlation between Youtube's popularity and the lack of moderation but that isn't what made them popular.
I do agree on the advertiser's demanding moderation and I honestly don't blame them. If I made a product and I'm paying good money for advertising. I wouldn't want my products to be even remotely associated with anything that might promote controversy AND lower sales. Emphasis on the AND. The companies job is to make money and if that means embracing censorship or decrying it then they'll do it. Hell, they'll even do both at the same time. Advertisers are a leech on society and I hate that I'm defending them. But they pay the bills so....
That doesn't mean that vast majority of users don't want moderation. Every "free-speech" alternative to an already existing platform that I've visited has been complete shit. Filled with nutjobs that couldn't play nice with the normal folk.
You're making the exact same logical fallacy you're pointing out. The reason free speech alternatives tend to be filled with less than desirable types is precisely because they're alternatives. Who are you going to disproportionately attract as early adopters? It's the same reason anti-Musk driven alternatives to Twitter are also failing. Instead of having a normal sampling of society, you end up with a hardcore bias which is offputting to most of everybody except those of that bias.
I also think Threads is perhaps a reasonable challenge to the idea that society wants moderation. Unlike the anti-Musk Twitter alternatives it started with a massive and mixed userbase and was a completely viable alternative, yet it almost immediately collapsed. It's really hard to see why without looking to the fact that were also featuring the sort of "moderation" that historically only comes as a bait-and-switch after a platform is extremely well established.
The reason people stopped using it was because after the initial install they realised it was missing basic features like a web app, search, chronological feed etc.
Those have now been added and reports from popular users is that engagement across the board is increasing again. Far from collapsing and well on its way to being a true Twitter alternative.
Multiple third party reports [1] are showing the site has lost ~80% of daily active users and of the < 10 million daily active users left, time spent in the app has decreased from nearly 20 minutes, to less than 3. I'm left to reference third party sites since Meta stopped reporting their numbers officially when it started cratering. That scale of collapse is unlikely to be due to the lack of effective search or a chronological feed.
> Since when has advertisement even implied endorsement of nearby content?
It's not an endorsement. People make associations all the time consciously or not. There are obviously positive and negative associations. And if it's within your power to reduce the negative associations which might impact the perception of your product then why won't you do it? Advertising is primarily an appeal towards emotion not logic. It's manipulative by nature.
I don't know what I'm saying that's so unreasonable.
Also, I can't control whether some homeless person pees next to my billboard, but if my competitors also have billboards in the area then I may still come out on top. But if I can move my weight to move those homeless people elsewhere, preferably to my competitors billboards then I'll do it. This isn't a moral argument.
Nobody associates Coke with the reek of bum piss because they encountered a messy billboard. This is simply an unreal line of argument.
It certainly would be interesting if we lived in a world where advertisers refused to run ads in stadiums of losing teams, ran their ads only on sunny days, and only on positive, uplifting tv episodes while entirely avoiding shows about serial killers. We can fantasize, but the actual world has never worked this way.
This seems like a generalization with as many counterexamples as examples. Also, users don't actually want censorship, they want a tailored experience that filters out whatever content they don't like.
> Social media companies may no longer promote or suppress content; they can only provide tools to let users do so themselves (eg filter/block/subscribe/tag)
Users don’t want the responsibility of filtering out CP, gore, sexual violence, etc. I would bet the average user actively wants that content suppressed. Just look at any of the cases of social media moderators developing PTSD from their work.
So if I run a social media site, I would be required by law to carry hate speech, incitement to overthrow the government, rape threats, heretical religious statements, fascist propaganda, and covid conspiracy videos? That's gonna be a no from me. Freedom of speech does not imply a mandate for others to broadcast your speech.
"innocent until proven guilty" and "freedom of speech" are principles codified in law.
The position that only the government is bound by "freedom of speech" is, at the very least, weird in an international context where things that are not the US government are expected to respect people's freedoms.
It is also perfectly legal to do a lot bad things like e.g. buying the product of slave labor in other countries or blood diamonds or buying stocks of companies known to pollute with wild disregard.
Also in the US:
> "innocent until proven guilty" only applies in a court of law.
is misleading, the more precise version is that "innocent until proven guilty" only applies in criminal courts.
This is not true. The independent corroborating evidence is also material. Contemporaneous records from a rape clinic is powerful evidence.
More generally, innocent until proven guilty is a legal concept, not a social one. From a social perspective, that's never been the standard, nor should it be. Bad folks have often been shunned without convictions - that's why the norm has been "resign in disgrace," not "get thrown in prison"
> innocent until proven guilty is a legal concept, not a social one
Yes, legalism is often taken too far, but that doesn't mean that mob rule is a good thing.
> Bad folks have often been shunned without convictions
Are you sure about that? I'd sooner say that only losers get "shunned". Powerful politicians don't get "shunned" for their corruption, actually sometimes it seems to help with their popularity. Likewise with mobsters?
Mobs go after the weak, not after the guilty. Whether they're lynching and necklacing their neighbors or "canceling" minor celebrity cranks.
Your rhetoric doesn't sound far off from that of people who called BLM protests mob riots. But they were protesting against militarized police, hardly the weak.
Or hell, from the other side of the political spectrum, Jan 6th was some real mob mentality behavior. But I'd hardly consider the "US government" weak.
Watergate happened a long time ago, not sure how relevant it is nowadays. It seems like the standards that politicians are held to have since crumbled, IMO. Nowadays it seems to be quite difficult for a politician or party to harm the public good or democracy enough to decrease their chances of reelection. The USA seems somewhat better in this respect than the EU, though.
> Anthony Weiner
Is there any hint that he was actually corrupt?
> Roy Moore
As far as I can see Moore was actually successful despite his corruption, even though he was actually sanctioned for it. In the end his fall was only caused by moralizing allegations about how he spends his private time.
> John Edwards
Again, it seems like he only lost his popularity due to his immoral actions as a family man, not as an official.
> compare YouTube demonetization to historical racial violence
Various kind of (physical, murderous) mob violence still happen regularly around the world. Some necklacing videos are available on the Web.
Think about what makes this alleged crime "really bad", and then consider if that might make it difficult for a victim to come forward. There is no statute of limitations for sexual assault in the UK.
“Innocent until proven guilty” is an incredibly high burden of proof that we reserve for criminal trials. In other contexts, this is not the appropriate standard —- civil suits, for example, use a “preponderance of evidence” standard. Non-state actors using a lower burden of proof is entirely appropriate.
Yes but the courts are legally empowered to lock someone in a cage for years. So they should be working by a different standard than a company firing someone.
I don’t know many people that would prefer the later, since being locked in a cage also comes with losing your job, a horrible accusation proven true (or admitted to) in court and a public criminal record.
Losing your income and being publicly shamed sucks, but you still can rely on close friends and family, a public safety net and lawsuits (if you’ve been defamed or illegally fired), while enjoying sunshine, fresh air and freedom of movement.
Yes, false accusations are indeed a bad thing. But the point is that people choosing to no longer associate with you is very different to people forcing you to live in a cage under the threat of violence.
Both are unpleasant. One is worse. Thus the burden of proof is different.
The only system? Which courts? Not all courts use the same system. The UK court system is different than the US system. Criminal court is different than civil.
I disagree with the premise of your comment but on a factual note: Russell Brand has been litigious on this very issue, he has threatened to take legal action and taken legal action against people who have spoken up about him. He has been widely "known" to be a predatory rapist for years but has used his money to intimidate those who wanted to speak up.
Innocent until proven guilty is a legal framework, it has nothing to do with popular actions, and never has. All it basically says is that Russell Brand cannot go to jail until he is proven guilty.
There are no laws requiring the public to treat an accused person as if they never committed a crime until said crime has been proven. It is up to the public whether they believe the victim or the accused. In this case youtube has decided to believe the victim. Perhaps youtube—like so many others—have deemed the accusations credible, and they are in their full right to act on these believes.
FTFY: Youtube has decided to believe the multiple independent lines of evidence which came out of a four year investigation by multiple journalists across more than one organisation.
This is not currently a legal matter, but a matter that concerns a public figure's ethical standards. Multiple independent lines of evidence is a powerful thing.
I’m under no legal obligation either to deny the allegations until proven. And in this case I choice to believe the victims. And I will keep calling them victims until proven otherwise.
You are saying it is wrong of me to call the victims, victims, and should instead call them ‘accusers’. I’m saying I am under no legal obligations to do so. I believe their stories and I believe they are victims, so I am allowed to call them victims.
Now I think there might be slander to call the accused something like an abuser, so I don’t do that (yet). However there is no slander laws which disallow me from using words which indicate that I believe the victims, so I’m not calling them ‘accusers’, I call them victims, because that is what I believe they are.
Of course you're allowed - there's no parent enforcing things and you aren't a child, and shouldn't be thinking that way.
But this is a strange response: "It's not illegal for me to say this!" Would you accept that as a response from a flat earther if you challenged something they stated as fact?
> So has the internet completely done away with innocent until proven guilty?
Yes. But to be fair it wouldn't be out of character for Russel, if you actually know who he is, so maybe that's why the internet finds it so easy to ignore silly things like "evidence" and "proof".
Your assumption is the reason his content was removed was because of the allegations, which is potentially not true. While it's very likely the allegations are what drew attention to it, it doesn’t mean there wasn’t a bunch of stuff there already that violated policies – especially given the content he had doubled down on.
All Youtube did was cite their “Creator responsibility“ clause[1] as the reason. This could have included a myriad of violations, especially considering the type of content he was producing.
Also, if you read the allegations, he very much was in the protected status you mention. “Open secret”, lots of people covering for him, running interference, etc etc. Calling him a “D-list celeb, likely with little to no major influence” illustrates your lack of research into the issue.
> there wasn’t a bunch of stuff there already that violated policies
Are you suggesting that it could be that his existing videos were in violation of community guidelines? Is there any evidence for this? I've watched some of his videos, and this seems like a rather silly accusation.
While it's not my place to adjudicate his innocence or guilt, the decisions by platforms like YouTube and the BBC to immediately curtail his revenue streams are ethically contentious. Such actions, rooted in the pursuit of reputational safety for these organizations, inadvertently presuppose guilt, potentially skewing public perception and compromising the accused's ability to muster an adequate defense, particularly in terms of securing robust legal representation.
For high-profile figures like Brand, while the financial impact may be substantial, they often have other resources at their disposal. However, for smaller creators, who might be living on the edge, this could be devastating. We need to remember that behind every headline are real people with real lives. Ensuring fairness and empathy in our responses, especially when the stakes are this high, is crucial.
Before reflexively expressing disagreement through a downvote, I invite and encourage a thoughtful discourse on the matter. It's disheartening to observe dissent without accompanying dialogue, as meaningful engagement fosters mutual understanding and growth.
What you express is so perfectly reasonable that the downvotes are likely just an emotional reaction, not something people would be able to articulate clearly as a logical argument.
They are all part of organizations / corporations which have monetized channels, yes. You think if Russell Brand joined up with a company he’d get a free pass all of a sudden? They’d just ban the entire company.
Wow so much focus in the comments on the individual instead of YouTube's ability to randomly remove whoever they dislike, reminding us of the problems with large corporate companies controlling essentially public services. Just imagine if Tencent decided to buy YouTube from Google, would get real interesting.
Youtube is not and never was a "public service". It's their platform and they are free to do with it as they want, with very little exception. It's not any different than a mom and pop store having a "No shirt, No shoes, No service" sign and enforcing that. It's their store, it's private property, it's their rules.
I get that, and I've been in the camp warning people of that many times, but I think it's an interesting situation where so much essentially public data is on a private platform. What happens if YouTube shuts down tomorrow? A, would society accept it and B, would they be bailed out? For the latter, what happens next? Honestly, I would not be against one of these massive services failing spectacularly to 'teach us a lesson' about trusting all our important things to private corps.
>What happens if YouTube shuts down tomorrow? A, would society accept it and B, would they be bailed out?
I see no reason to "bail out" youtube if they close shop due to insolvency.
>I would not be against one of these massive services failing spectacularly to 'teach us a lesson' about trusting all our important things to private corps.
"important things"? You mean all the troll comments and misinformation being spread there? Or the very few videos that are actually interesting or useful? If the content creators don't still have those videos backed up somewhere other than youtube, then that's their failure. If they want those videos streamed on another platform, they are free to upload their content anywhere they want to, or even host it themselves.
They bought Reddit. YouTube was bleeding Google's profits for a long time at least (is it still? I don't actually know). It's not exactly absurd, just extremely unlikely.
It's impossible, yes? Let's see what happens next US election as a good start, I can't imagine what becomes 'misonformation' or 'harmful,' no matter which party wins.
And still you wasted brain space to respond, very witty.
YouTube is not a court and Brand has not been found guilty of anything.
YouTube is enforcing its ToS, which Brand freely agreed to when he chose to begin using their platform to post his conspiracy theories.
> And it pads the pockets of shareholders
YouTube runs adverts on videos which are not part of the partnership program, but it is unclear (as far as I can see from this thread) whether they run adverts on de-monetised videos. Do you have a source either way?
In any case, YouTube did $29.9 billion of revenue in FY2022. The Guardian estimated that Brand's YouTube videos, of which there are five per week, likely gross him (pre-tax) in the order of $5,000. That's around $1.3m a year.
So yes, if YouTube is still running ads against Brand's YouTube videos then "the shareholders" are benefitting from an additional $1.3m per year which would otherwise have been paid out to Brand, but now that you know the aggregate benefit to YouTube constitutes 0.000044% of the service's annual revenue, I'm curious as to whether you think this had any bearing whatsoever on the decision to demonetise him, in line with their Terms of Service?
So what happens if the allegations turn out to hold no weight? Does he get his channel back and the bureaucrat NPCs self-flagellate with hashtag mea culpas?
If you are accused, you don't lose your job; proof must be there first. Otherwise, you can sue for wrongful termination, and there will be hell to pay in dollars. HR's job is to protect the company first, so unless they catch someone in the act, they won't know or want to know unless it comes from you or the cops.
But this is different because it's politics and a public person. It's different rules for them. Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard is an excellent example of how easily the mobs can be misled and manipulated.
I don't think it's fair that allegations can destroy a man's life just because he's famous, but that's how the cosmic cookie crumbled.
Technically, YouTube should only be able to demonetize Russel Brand once he's proven guilty, but pointing out hypocrisy makes one very unpopular nowadays
I’m a Texan so I am, for some people, in a fanatical place for “right to work”. Even here, If you get a DUI, only way you get fired is if they find out, which they shouldn’t.
In that case you could sue and why it doesn’t happen is because of the legal consequences.
Maybe they will, maybe you ran over some kids and their puppies and you come out in the news. But otherwise no one has the right or power to find out because all citizens have a right to privacy: innocent until proven guilty and due process.
What we have here is a double standard in that public figures apparently don’t have that right, unless you toe the party line like Howard Stern or belong to the secular left priesthood like bill Clinton.
Most people are perfectly ok with that because most people are driven by ideology. I’m sure that soon no one will have any right to privacy unless they have a good credit score and vote for whoever happens to be in power at the time
Elon has settled out of court to silence misconduct allegations. Surely Google will stick to their principles and demonetize all content featuring him and others since a conviction in court is apparently not necessary?
The amount of comments on this that are getting flagged whilst meeting the guidelines is making me question the state of HN as a platform for rational good faith debate. Has tribalism really took over here too?
Have some examples? The few I see are things like victim-blaming (37576676 37576735) or just "innocent until proven guilty" which adds absolutely nothing to the conversation.
Well for one, I don't see how "innocent until proven guilty" posts should be flagged. Maybe they don't add much to the conversation, but people should be allowed to express such a simple sentiment without being flagged to death, just ignore them and move on. Flagging is equivalent to silencing someone, and I don't think we should be doing that apart from cases of obvious hate speech such as racism.
Personally, I found the 37576735 comment interesting because I hadn't thought of this in the context of statue of limitations, even if it does come across a little victim blaming. And the victim blaming was called out and addressed by other comments. In general I think this is the better approach to flagging - state what you disagree and try to change minds rather than just flagging it outright.
This seems like a reasonable statement to make if the author disagrees with the censorship:
By flagging my comment I have no idea what people dislike about it - I presume it's the anti mainstream media stance but I don't know. I'm open to having my mind changed and my thoughts challenged but that can't happen if people can no longer engage with my comment because it's flagged. Personally, I thought it added context, particularly for non-British readers, about the UK media, laws and cultural landscape and how it plays into all of this.
Your observation underscores a fundamental challenge in public discourse: determining which contributions substantively further a conversation. While the repeated mentions of "innocent until proven guilty" or instances that may appear as victim-blaming can feel redundant or unproductive to some, for others, these comments might encapsulate deeply held beliefs or concerns. Recognizing this, it's crucial to appreciate the multiplicity of perspectives.
However, true progress in any debate relies on a collective willingness to delve deeper, to move beyond surface-level assertions and to engage with the nuanced complexities of the issue at hand. Dismissing certain viewpoints as merely "adding nothing" can inhibit this deeper exploration. We should endeavor to foster an environment where contributors feel empowered to expand upon their initial sentiments, illuminating the reasons behind them. Only then can we bridge understanding and foster a richer, more productive dialogue.
Nit: Advertisers, or at least those with deep pockets, hate controversy. That drives advertising platforms to hate it. Though the fact that X hasn’t hemorrhaged even more money seems to be finding where that argument intercepts the value for views advertisers will place.
Nay: The Vox Populi hate controversy. Like any cancellation, the masses bombard something demanding a pound of flesh. To avoid controversy and pacify the masses, platforms cave. There is no downside for YouTube demonetizing someone that has been accused of anything. If it turns out to be completely false, then YouTube will say they were acting out of an abundance of caution. If then the exonerated person seeks redress, YouTube can just shrug and say where else are you going to host content?
That isn't it. Advertisers have repeatedly shown a huge willingness to court severe controversy. They use obese people to advertise swimwear, they run ads that tell men that they're toxic and terrible.
“These are smart people, they do so much research. They know they’re taking on a topic that could be controversial," said Rob Baiocco, co-founder and chief creative officer of BAM Connection, a New York-based marketing firm.
The actual thing motivating these people is simply hatred towards anyone who doesn't bend the knee to their new religion. That's it, that's all there is to it. Beyond that, there is no motivation.
They’re able to come up with the most contrived scenarios, but the idea that money in the form of profits is driving advertising decisions is apparently inconceivable.
"Controversy" == "media campaigns accusing advertisers of doing something nefarious". Let's not pretend that the "controversy" is some grassroot movement in which many people, independently of one another, decide they're offended by a brand advertising alongside a content they don't even watch.
It's not a matter of guilt, it's a matter of profitability. If there were advertisers beating down their doors now to get their products placed alongside Russel Brand's face they'd leave him monetised. YouTube is truly neutral here, they are just revenue maximizing, don't mistake this for a moral position. If they make a statement later, it'll be for ROI as well.
But that doesn't quite line up with what is going on. They did not remove his videos, they demonetized them. Youtube is still running ads on Brand's videos, so the content is still being paid for by advertisers. If advertisers were beating down their doors then there would be no advertising on those videos.
Well it's an aggregate. Advertisers don't want to spend money on a platform that allowed Russel Brand to make money. The problem with advertiser's and the public is that platforms are seen as whole. Advertising on the platform is seen as a vague approval of the platform as a whole.
There are plenty of rappers monetizing their videos. King Von was never demonetized despite being known to have killed at least 7 people. That is much worse than what Brand is alleged to have done. So this isn't a moral judgement, this is a business decision.
Innocent until proven guilty is a standard for court proceedings. I am not a court, and I can even disagree with what a court decides. I can use my own judgment to draw conclusions and form opinions. For example, I can be confident that OJ is a murderer even though be was not convicted and was declared not guilty.
This is a category error. Courts use a methodology that's the best one we have for discovering the truth. They don't always do it well (e.g. the OJ case) and you as an individual can use the same methodology to understand if something happened or not. It's the methodology, not the "being a court" that is key.
I as an individual do not have the powers of a court, and cannot do the things a court can do to ACTUALLY get close to "the truth", and must rely on what little information I am allowed to have.
YouTube does not have the power to assign guilt. They are exercising a contractual privilege agreed to by Mr. Brand when he decided to upload videos to their platform.
Of course it has, and we all know it. He's now been proven to be "that guy who had rape accusations" by "multiple women". Or the "controversial figure known for his wild antics and potentially non consensual dealings with women in the past".
It's all just the start of a large machine thats been set in motion. Every news outlet that doesn't like him or doesn't want to portray him in a neutral or positive light will use this. They'll never say anything that can be factually proven wrong. This allows them to have selective bias which drives an agenda and is steering the thoughts of their readers into a specific direction.
What an absolutely deranged comment. Putting aside the fact that you're going up to bat for some random guy that you don't personally know. Instead of listening to the testimonies, let it go to court and then make a judgement. But the thought of preemptively supporting a stranger that's been accused of rape is actually insane.
And if news outlets don't want to work with him then they can just stop inviting him to things. They don't need to accuse him of anything. Just stop giving him roles and he's out of the spotlight. He'll fade away into obscurity.
Take your meds and get off the internet for a bit.
This is the kind of delusional thinking that just doesn't work in the real world.
Because in the real world there are defamation laws. There are serious consequences for news organisations that publish accusations that are not able to be corroborated. Especially so when the claims are so significant i.e. multiple rape/sexual assaults.
Which is why despite apparently everyone in the comedy and entertainment industries knowing this was going on for 20+ years no allegations have made their way into the media.
It’s not even an allegation, it’s a news story. It’s pretty crazy that they would do this because of a story, not even criminal charges being brought. Apparently you don’t even have to get formally accused anymore. People say “it’s bad for advertising” but these acts of extreme abuse of moderation on YouTube have hugely contributed to other websites springing up. I have no doubt their market share overall is slipping despite their revenue growing, it will only be a matter of time before advertisers realize they can get more eyes more cheaply elsewhere. We’re long beyond the days where people believe a random advertisement on the same page as some random guy they don’t like matters. Somehow companies are stuck in the idea of the days of television where you sponsored a specific show. Now everyone knows if your advertising on google it doesn’t mean the advertisement agrees with every action of every person who appears in a search result.
Your post was already outdated. Abuse charges have to be reported to the police, and the police is investigating, as is his employer at the time the BBC.
Your spinning this as “just a story” is disingenuous. This “story” was investigated by top journalists for over a year, and published in a prestige news journal. Both the journalists working on the story and the paper that published it have their journalistic integrity at stake here. They wouldn’t publish this story unless they had some very credible sources to back them up.
So to correct you, this isn’t just an allegation. These are a series of very credible allegation which are under investigation by several authorities.
Of course it is up to you if you believe those allegations, I just hope you realize how credible these allegations are before you do so, and if you chose to not believe the victims, I hope you understand that you might have some unfortunate biases which makes you favor the accused.
The Sunday Times, the same prestigious news paper which consistently rejected HIV’s role in AIDS and partook in Phone Hacking - including (as alleged by him) the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. [0] Not to mention The Times generally being a Tory sycophantic outlet, just behind the Telegraph.
Gosh, imagine if this story tarnished their pristine reputation and that of the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch.
> So, this is literally, "an allegation is enough" scenario.
If you're a private entity without the investigative powers of law enforcement, then public knowledge and your best judgement better be enough, because they're all you have.
> Whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty" ?
That's a standard of the legal system. Private parties have lesser powers of punishment and investigation, so correspondingly a less strict standard of proof.
It would be an abridgement of a private party's freedom to decide, this person is sketchy I don't want to work with them. That's appropriate where protected statuses are involved, but by default there should be freedom.
Of course the issue is that Google is not just a “private party” like you or I. It is a 190,000 person organization worth almost 2 trillion dollars. They have a huge market share for monetized video hosting.
If there were 100 nearly equally sized video platforms your argument would me much more persuasive, but at YouTube’s size, to me, they have an obligation to treat video creators with a greater degree of fairness and formal process.
If Google does not want to do this, perhaps they are simply too big and should be broken up.
> they have an obligation to treat video creators with a greater degree of fairness and formal process
There isn't really a way to enforce this that doesn't violate a private company's rights. Protected classes are the closest thing, but I think you'll have a tough time getting "person accused of being a jerk" to be declared a protected class.
> perhaps they are simply too big and should be broken up
This, however, there's tons of precedent for. It's the right solution, and we should absolutely be breaking all of the big tech companies up. The current FTC & DOJ are heading in that direction[1,2]. If you like that direction, it's something to consider when you're filling out the ballot each November.
There is tons of precedent for something like this. It's called Common Carrier law. This applies to phone networks, railroads, airlines, pipelines, electric, water, sewer, and trash utilities, internet service providers, etc.
The basic idea is that if a carrier is at least a quasi-monopoly, they have to provide service to anyone unless they have a "good reason." Of course what these reasons might be will vary depending on the business, but would generally not include being accused of a crime. The electric company is not allowed to cut off your power if you are accused (or even convicted) of sexual assault, as long as you pay your bill on time and don't vandalize their equipment etc.
No matter how much you want it to be, YouTube is not a utility. Antitrust law is the right remedy here. Solve this through market competition by breaking up the big companies, not speech stifling regulations.
If Google was compelled to keep arbitrary content monetized, the first thing they'd do is improve the tooling for advertisers to opt out of objectionable content in a more automated way.
You're just pushing the problem to a different level. It's easy to make a case that Google has to carry content, but forcing advertisers to spend money sponsoring it?
Yes but I'm pushing the problem to a level where there is competition. There are many advertisers. If even a large group of advertisers doesn't want to advertise on Russell Brand's videos, fine. Probably he would get significantly lower ad rates than other more widely acceptable content, but that's between him and the advertisers -- there's no middleman that refuses to let him make any money at all.
Frankly, I think supporting content through advertising stinks, but that's another matter.
All of the entities you mentioned exclusive of internet platforms have in common that they transport goods or passengers for a fee and are open to the public. Internet platforms are not common carriers despite how badly some want to thwart private property rights.
Telephone services and internet services in some states are considered common carriers (net neutrality). In the case of an oligopoly like the streaming video market, it makes sense to force large players to make their platforms available on a non-discriminatory basis. I agree that breaking up YouTube would also solve the problem though.
Right, because telcos and isps carry passengers or goods for a fee and they are open to the public. That’s why they are common carriers.
Where you miss the mark is that it does not, in fact, make any sense whatsoever and indeed would be illegal to commandeer someone’s computer and force it to do things the owner does not want it to do. This is quite foundational to our private property regime.
Telcos and ISPs carry packets from place to place. YouTube carries videos from place to place. That's a fairly fine distinction. The ISPs computers are being "commandeered" in exactly the same way.
Telcos and isps have terms of service and contractual provisions that allow for common carriage. They clearly and intentionally seek this status to protect themselves from liability rooted in the carriage. (Edit: in exchange for additional duties based on the special relationship formed, if I recall correctly).
Purveyors of coherent speech products derive similar but different immunity from cda section 230, with terms of service that define the relationship as distinctly not content neutral.
Accordingly there is a very differentiated line: the common carriage of goods. Common carriers do it but internet platforms do not.
Stepping back a moment, I stated before that the fee element of common carriage was not present in internet platforms but of course you can buy movies on YouTube so this is not as universally true as I said. On the other hand, try posting a snuff video to YouTube and you will see exactly why it is not a common carrier.
As I understand it, the argument is that if a web site gets to be sufficiently systemically critical to (society? Democracy?) that it should not be allowed to control its speech product. This would go a long way toward making every website 4chan, which is not an optimal outcome.
However I’m curious if I’m missing something. Is the goal here to deny, for example, LinkedIn the ability to constrain you from posting pornography? Or to constrain stack overflow from allowing you to post poor quality answers?
Companies don't choose to be common carriers if they can still be a monopoly/oligopoly without it. The reason common carrier regulations were adopted was because companies that had monopolies (some natural, some not), would use those monopolies in ways that were seen to be unfair competition.
All else equal, any company would rather pick and choose their customers rather than be forced to serve customers that they'd rather not for one reason or another.
If the customers they don’t want to serve are unwanted because their contribution doesn’t fit the market the company is seeking with its coherent speech product than its first amendment rights are being infringed when you force the carriage of the unwanted content.
Furthermore, forcing every social media platform to carry everything is just a questionable idea, regardless. I’m sure you have seen unmoderated internet. It’s not surprising that the common carrier model doesn’t fit social media platforms given that it would lead to perverse results.
The way to enforce it is with with monopoly or collusion rules. Google has 39% of all digital advertising worldwide according to a quick Google search. However, I think digital advertising is too broad to even be considered a single category - you should have digital advertising of images, text, video, sound, and so on. Television and radio are different categories, why would you not do the same online? They have the capability to be a monopoly or collude with enough companies to exert monopoly power that they can abuse in some of those categories. Combine this with the fact that they receive special legal protections from liability for user posted content. Their protections against user content should be less if they are editorializing or treating content differently the content. I don't think they should be liable for user posted content, but they should have a responsibility to treat content equally, subject to fines. If they are going to demonetize or ban Russell Brand for a unverified news story, then if their CEO or even the president of the US receive an unverified news story against them (as the president has), they should get the exact same treatment. This is because rules enforced unequally harm content creators and users. The harm comes by way of lying to people. If every person who likes the color blue is getting demonetized, without notifying users of the rule, but every person who likes the color red gets promoted up, a user would be tricked into thinking the whole world likes red. That harm is tangible enough when it comes to important or political topics to deserve fines. The harm coming from not explicitly saying your rules. We protect a consumer from tobacco by forcing them to tell the truth about the product. THe same goes for tech. I'm sure some will say well these kind of lies aren't that bad, but they are, these are peoples lives and for many their source of income and to get treated differently on a whim tricks the content creators (essentially employees) as well as the users.
I was able to read at least part of the article without a subscription. Folks wanted to send Nixon some pointed complaints (go figure, who could have imagined) and telegraph operators weren’t letting them. Seems telegraph companies left matters of decency up to the discretion of the operator, at least by 1970 (and I bet you’d get a lot of “you may take your business elsewhere” for various sorts of messages you tried to send, before that, to the point that much speech was de-facto banned)
Should the people who work at & run companies have freedom of association? Yes, I think they should. There are narrow exceptions for things like utilities, where a monopoly is the only sane way to run the service (we can't have 12 separate gas/power/water/sewer/phone/internet lines run to every house), but that situation doesn't apply to an Internet video hosting company.
We already have a well-established mechanism for reigning in companies that are too powerful: anti-trust law. All we need to do is enforce it.
> then public knowledge and your best judgement better be enough, because they're all you have
In that case, this should be made clear in their terms of service, that in case they come to a conclusion based on "public knowledge" and their own "judgement", the user can be de-platformed without recourse to any appeal.
I do understand the difficult position Youtube is in. However, this is a dangerous path that we are forging for ourselves. If RB's video content violated the TOS, they would have been deleted long ago. If he put up a video intimidating or threatening violence to the victims, I can understand the issue.
Brand's autobiography "My Booky Wook" has quite a few rapey/manipulative portions. It was a less sensitive time, pre Me Too, so he was more open about being a creep.
He was a self-confessed sex-addict and drug-addict over many years in that 90s-00s period.
He may well have some crimes to answer for: drugs were, and continue to be, illegal in the UK; perhaps sex-addicts are always close to the edge of criminality.
However, all those potential crimes are a long time ago. The police and his accusers have chosen to stay silent for a long time.
Some potentially self-incriminating stories have come from his own rehabilitation narrative.
It remains to be seen if the accusations can be upheld in a court of law, but the timing is suspicious.
It is only after a few years of criticizing the MSM and government overreach that someone has decided to dig up those old potential offences.
I do not like Brand's act or lifestyle. He always appeared to be (and gloried in) the persona of a silver-tongued charismatic saviour, a hippy version of a loquacious Renaissance Jesus, complete with long hair and (now salt'n'pepper) beard.
However, the timing remains interesting, and I suspect, not coincidental with his rising anti-establishment fame - not to mention a YT pot of money to attract plaintiffs and their lawyers.
There is a fading tide of cancel culture, perhaps Brand will be just become some flawed flotsam or jetsam on that ebbing swell.
>He was a self-confessed sex-addict and drug-addict over many years in that 90s-00s period
And even as such, had no complaints against him who bothered to go to the police and file/sue, not even at the height of me-too.
Then only things I've read are things like "he make lewd comments".
Then, on 2019 (? and they release now?) they get anonymous accusations, and even those to the press, not the police (the police merely says they are aware of "media reporting of a series of allegations"), from what the news say, for things that cannot be really verified aside from he-said/she-said anymore over 10 or 15 years after.
>He may well have some crimes to answer for: drugs were, and continue to be, illegal in the UK
Well, if he was investigated (by the police, not the press, like now) for drug use that would be relevant (even though still suspicious due to the timing and the focus on some individual where close to a million people use illegal drugs in the UK every day).
>It is only after a few years of criticizing the MSM and government overreach that someone has decided to dig up those old potential offences
And also where he's a nice "thought crime" target for all mainstream media types.
> One woman alleges that Brand raped her without a condom against a wall in his Los Angeles home. She says Brand tried to stop her leaving until she told him she was going to the bathroom. She was treated at a rape crisis centre on the same day, which the Times says it has confirmed via medical records
Is that not a "complaint against him who bothered to go to the police"?
Such a center is not the same as the police (which would be corroborating the story, running lab tests, bringing the alleged perpetrator in for questioning, and so on).
Dunnow, being cracked out your mind and chasing your ex around your locked bedroom when she's asked to leave, mounting and grinding here, all while your naked is a bit a much ?
The law has Innocent until proven Guilty, and statutes of limitation. If only the court of public opinion had such checks and balances. And it's clear Youtube is following the latter and not the former
This reads like you're saying its a bad thing to prove the existence of these manipulative power structures because it happens to make someone more credible. Like "No, no, power structures, stay hidden, you're only helping him."
Certainly among his existing fanbase (and others), there will be some who believe his denials and claims that there's a conspiracy against him, and there will be others who despite believing the accusations think there's nothing wrong with rape and that he should still be admired for all the sex he's had. Hopefully neither of those groups will be a large number of people, but they'll certainly be more than a couple of people.
Its really atrocious on so many levels, and speaks to a real ethics issue we, in the West, are ill-prepared to address - first, that he could have gotten away with these alleged actions for so long, atrocity #1, but then - second, that he has had his livelihood completely upended on the basis of unproven allegations which have not yet been confirmed through the legal process that is a core issue in Western moral values, atrocity #2..
"I'm a celebrity, I can get away with this .. " combined with "He's a celebrity and doesn't deserve to make money because of the things he <allegedly> got away with .." makes for one hell of a distorted moral position.
Either way, I hope that more people pay attention to the things he's communicating, because it is obvious to even the most casual observer that he's upsetting the power structures that propagate these sexcrime narratives, in the first place ..
> it is obvious to even the most casual observer that he's upsetting the power structures that propagate these sexcrime narratives
You're saying that there are 'power structures' that propagate 'these sexcrime narratives'. I'm obviously not casual observer enough because I don't know which power structures you are referring too. Could you please tell a bit more about them?
The very institutions making these claims against Brand have been profiting from propagating the sexcrime narrative - or, covering it up - for decades. These very institutions have also been involved in protecting known pedophiles from public scrutiny - so this is why I believe its very telling that they are turning their craven eye on Brand, who has done a lot to point this out over the last couple of years ..
Sure. Look at how #Metoo handled sexual allegations Then it died when Tara Reade allegations started threatening Joe Bidens power, and the power structure that was propagating #Metoo stopped exerting power and "suddenly everyone stopped caring about #Metoo, it's out of the news cycle"
Yeah definitely not. 95% of what he's talking about is true and correct, it's largely about the systemic corruption in politics. If you think none of that is real your education on US government stopped at Schoolhouse Rock.
I don't know anything about Russell Brand but I am just browsing through his recent videos and yes it's very much woo and conspiracy. His latest videos, chronoligically (I won't be clicking any of them, so some are hard to assess),
* So, this is happening - appears to be about the scenario under discussion here
* Hang on, Biden 9/11 Speech Was A Lie?! - conspiracy nuttery
* Bill Gates Has Been HIDING This And It's ALL About To Come Out - with an anti-vax symbol in the thumbnail, conspiracy nuttery
* Hang On, Obama Did WHAT?! - hard to say what this is about
* So, Trump Just Said THIS About Vaccines And It Changes EVERYTHING - conspiracy nuttery
* So, They LIED To Hawaii Victims About THIS - conspiracy nuttery
* So… They Fcking KNEW It Was A Lie All Along - conspiracy nuttery
Tucker’s Countdown To WW3 Has Started… - doomer nonsense
* The FBI Have Been Harvesting Your DNA?! - conspiracy nuttery
* So… Trump Just Changed EVERYTHING With This Move - no idea
* Shoespiracy EXPOSED: The HIDDEN Truth Of The Shoe Industry - conspiracy nuttery
* So… Tucker Just COMPLETELY FLIPPED The Ukraine Narrative - no idea but sounds stupid as hell
I didn't cherry pick anything, this was purely chronological.
If the videos that I listed are about something other than the title I would be interested to hear it. I sure as hell am not going to listen to a rapist talk about 9/11 and vaccines to verify it.
This seems like a pretty uncurious point of view to post on a forum thats all about intellectual curiousity. What discussion can there be if you intentionally put blinders on like this?
I don't get it. Do you disagree? How many of your textbooks could have been written by drunken adulterers or abusers?
I don't know that what brand says is right or wrong, and I'd understand the "oh dear, of course I wouldn't listen to that kind of riffraff" performance if you had HR or a boss to worry about, but who thinks that way when they have the freedom not to?
Who thinks what way? Who thinks, "This fucking jackass who's been spouting nonsense for years is now being accused of rape. A guy who has a rumble channel... I should check out that guys sketchy and culty content! FREEEEDDOOOOOOOOOOM!"
I have the freedom to poison myself with household cleaners every damn day, but I don't. Does that make me a 'sheeple'?
Your preferences are your prerogative. My point was in response to mvdtnz weighing in on something while being explicitly ignorant on the subject.
Its like going to a book club meeting, telling everyone that you obviously didn't read the book because you're not some unwashed heathen, and then proceeding to confidently give your analysis based on what you half heard someone on the train say about chapter 2.
To be very fair his youtube titles tell a lot about their content. To any persona with more than a handful of working neurons, that's more than enough.
Dude has lived so long without true consequences, getting second chance after second chance at the bbc before high tailing it to LA ... couple that with the probably epic amount of drugs and alcohol. My dude has cooked his brain.
So it looks like you actually have something behind your opinion. That's worthwhile.
> To be very fair his youtube titles tell a lot about their content. To any persona with more than a handful of working neurons, that's more than enough.
I can't agree with that. A handful of working neurons doesn't magically give you the ability to divine the contents of a book from its cover.
But it seems like you've at least watched some of his content and have your own opinion on it. I can respect that.
What I can't respect is when people happily form their opinions based on vague impressions gleaned from other people who also aren't familiar with the subject matter, and then pass that opinion on as if it's worth something.
> Just asking questions (also known as JAQing off, or as emojis: ""[1]) is a way of attempting to make wild accusations acceptable (and hopefully not legally actionable) by framing them as questions rather than statements. It shifts the burden of proof to one's opponent; rather than laboriously having to prove that all politicians are reptoid scum, one can pull out one single odd piece of evidence and force the opponent to explain why the evidence is wrong.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all to argue that YouTube has an effective monopoly in the video sharing space. Yes, there are certainly other platforms — Vimeo, Rumble, etc. — but purely in terms of reachability, YouTube absolutely holds near-absolute reign here. Trying to effectively monetize video content on other platforms, from what I understand, is extremely unlikely for the vast majority of creators.
And while there’s a valid counter-argument in some of the numbers creators on X have put up (e.g., Tucker Carlson), those are really the exceptional cases.
I could see Brand going straight over to X, but I don’t know if that’s sufficient to really argue that YouTube isn’t effectively a monopoly in the space.
I wish there was a viable alternative to everything Google (search, youtube, android, maps to name a few). I can't wait for Elon to buy Google and end this BS.
I think there is (for search at least, I may be biased), the question is are we ready to pay for it, or we expect the same business model as Google's (ad-tech) to somehow produce a better product for its users?
Frankly I can't tell you anyone off the top of my mind, since this isn't a subject I find interesting enough to bother keeping a list. There also aren't that many "celebrities" that I'm aware of.
I guess you're doubting that I would've said what I said before the allegations started. There's nothing you I can do prove anything to you.
YouTube is a scam. The SEC needs to shut them down. The government needs to seize it without compensation and nationalize it such that it can be run in a legal, non-discriminatory way which is consistent with the principles of democracy which made it possible for YouTube to exist in the first place. Surely that's the last straw. Nationalize YouTube.
I'd sooner nationalize the network they abuse rather than their business and all the attendant problems it's collected over the past two decades. The internet has been monopolized and we're all poorer for it.
