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.
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?
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"
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 ..
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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" 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.
> 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".
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.
"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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
> 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".
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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"
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 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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
"“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."
"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.
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.)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
See also "cerveza sickness" for when any discussion about COVID would get you flagged, and any narrative except the latest globalist one was tolerated.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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?
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).
> 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.
> 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'.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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 ?
> 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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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? :)
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 difference between questioning everything and rejecting everything from the mainstream is an important one which Brand and many others seem not to understand.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
> 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?
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 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
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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'.
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.
> 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"
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 460 ms ] threadFor 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.
"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 ..
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 accusations are not anonymous.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/gillette-woke-now-when-...
“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.
A more accurate statement is that advertising companies hate some people and factions.
* 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.
Is this how you go about understanding the world around you?
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?
I have the freedom to poison myself with household cleaners every damn day, but I don't. Does that make me a 'sheeple'?
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.
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.
> 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.
But this seems to be something else.
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.
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.
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.
[1] The first stab from the FTC is at Amazon: "if the FTC succeeds in court, it could result in a forced breakup or restructuring of Amazon" https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/08/amazons-final-ta...
[2] And DOJ is taking a stab at Google: "[The DOJ] might even become emboldened to break up some of the biggest tech companies" https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/heres-exactly-wh...
Should a private company have those rights? We meed corporate reform in America.
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.
Google is a public company
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
Frankly, I think supporting content through advertising stinks, but that's another matter.
Have you ever had your TV get disabled because your cable company didn't like the content you were watching?
140 years ago in the age of telegram, I suspect they weren't censoring messages they didn't like either.
Did someone's internet connection get disabled?
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)
If the people or the state want google to do this the should make a law to require it to do so.
If they don’t comply then, please break them up, sue them, fine them.
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.
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.
Gosh, imagine if this story tarnished their pristine reputation and that of the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki...
Youtube is fine with hosting the videos of a "rapey/manipulative" creep as long as they get to keep the money.
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.
https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1634153760149602307
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.
This was what early internet was like: Usenet, IRC, etc.
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.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
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.
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".
They call it the Creator Responsibility Policy.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7650329?hl=en
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They choose platforms with moderation (aka censorship) and stay away from those that don't.
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.
Please provide examples.
So we can compare them to the likes of Meta, Netflix, Spotify, Apple, Reddit etc.
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.
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.
[1] - https://gizmodo.com/threads-has-lost-more-than-80-of-daily-a...
If I see a billboard on a bus station, what is the advertiser endorsing here?
What about a magazine ad? Reasonable people assume the advertiser supports every view expressed therein?
If I happened to see an ad on a website with user generated content, would I really think the advertiser endorsed each post?
Sorry, this argument is fallacious. Reasonable people do not make these conclusions.
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.
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/05/984440891/justice-clarence-th...
They remove child pornography. They comply with DMCA. They ban entire countries.
You want to show your content on the internet? Start your own hosting service or find one that will allow your content. Nobody owes you anything.
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.
“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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Why?
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.
Neither do corporations. This is easy to demonstrate. Imagine you refuse to talk to Trump supporters - most people would say that's your right.
> It's still freedom of speech and association to not want to do business with certain people
imagine the outrage if Tomorrow YouTube deletes accounts for anyone that supported Trump
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.
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.
That meaning being “the concept of innocent until proven guilty is only universally applicable in a court of law”.
So unless your psyche has any force beyond itself or it happens to be a court of law, your gotcha lacks any meaningful effect.
Beyond you grandstanding that is.
- It’s not about enforcing anything on anyone, I think you’re missing the point
- Thank you for your contribution
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.
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".
We have a victim who has gone to police. We have three newspapers who have corroborating evidence.
And in response Brand hasn't had his videos removed and his live shows have been temporarily suspended.
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.
Not the victim. The accuser, who may be a victim.
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.
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?
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 not a court. Are you a court?
I hope you're not a court. Sentient buildings weird me out.
If four employees came to me and accused someone of harassing them, I would weigh the evidence and if warranted, fire the employee. No court involved.
When you are self-righteous prick as prickly as brand, it is extremely easy to believe the accusers.
This is why courts use the only system that has a chance of finding the truth.
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.
Both are unpleasant. One is worse. Thus the burden of proof is different.
Courts are not buildings, sentient or otherwise. A court can exist without even a single brick or piece of stone being around.
You're also making this about Brand when in fact this is a discussion at a higher level of abstraction.
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"
Well, that’s enough of this thread for me.
Unfuckingbelievable.
Is it reasonable to expect them to do so? Maybe. Probably not pre Me-Too, and especially if they didn't know about each other.
Does it change my interpretation either way? Not really. Contemporaneous records from an independent third party undercut most of my concerns.
Notably, many US states don't have statutes of limitation for rape. Practical reasons can be overcome.
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.
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.
Richard Nixon would like a word. As would Anthony Weiner, Roy Moore, John Edwards, and a few others.
Have often != are always.
I'm pointing out the long-term existence of a common second standard, not its consistent application.
> Whether they're lynching and necklacing their neighbors or "canceling" minor celebrity cranks.
It seems you have some big feelings you should confront, to compare YouTube demonetization to historical racial violence
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.
YouTube isn't a court of law, fortunately.
If he's innocent, he can sue them.
"Until" always makes it sound to me like it is a foregone conclusion.
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.
[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7650329?hl=en as the reason.
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.
I found a page of other unfair practices that google is using to steal our cash: https://fliki.ai/blog/new-youtube-monetization-requirements
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.
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.
It's not "saving" their customers (advertisers). It's denying wages to the producer.
I can't see it as anything other than virtue signaling, coupled with a profit.
It's a pretty fair decision that avoids the legal system entirely. The person who uploaded the video can always request to have it taken down.
Russell Brand has 1.4 million followers on Rumble
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.
But he can private the videos at anytime. Even unlisting it would remove all ads while allowing people to find the videos (via links).
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.
Cutting off one's nose to spite one's face doesn't seem to be a canny strategy here (or anywhere?)
Please link to any example of one of Brand's youtube videos that is still running ads
"“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."
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/sep/18/how-russell-...
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.)
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.
1. https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxUtzzTeakkcWlZp531K_jZ6JGWUSKbU7...
Pure trolling, kind of funny, 100% clips of public figures with no commentary. Demonetized.
Doesn’t sound like satire or commentary to me
How do you think any news media functions?
If you are commentating on it and making significant changes, then it can be fair use.
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.
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.
Why do you think all of the media responses to viral things on twitter are "Hey, I'm X from Y News Corp; can we use your footage"?
If it was fair use they wouldn't bother to ask.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0]: https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-dark-hand-in-twitter-ce...
> 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".
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files#Nos._6-7:_FBI_co... Releases 6, 7, 8, 9 & 10 being particularly interesting.
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.
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.
Yes, Trump was president at the time.
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.
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?
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.
Read the injunction itself: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23867628/preliminary-... that prohibits communication between government and social media companies precisely because of this coercion.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.racket.news/p/youtube-hits-orf-again-as-censorsh...
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.
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?
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?
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.
>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.
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.
Like Wikipedia? Or like public Square? Or like a government inquest?
All are different. All are also influenced by capital
More like yet another reflection of the extant overton window.
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
(see: wikileaks)
Unfortunately, there's a load minority who try to push this when this far from the truth.
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.
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.
Then why does Google control my phone? Can't have it both ways
Because you chose to buy that phone. Plenty of phones without their software.
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 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.
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.
Same for an electronic money account.
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.
I can’t fly to another planet and terraform it. I can (and do) host my own video streams however.
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.
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.
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.
And any abuse should be prosecuted by the government.
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.
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.
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.
The Rohingya for one
Lets be clear here - we're not talking about difference in opinion of fiscal policy that we can debate the pros and cons of.
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.
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.
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.
Where is my error in understanding?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Agree completely.
This... actually is a hopeful insight to me.
I wrote a thing a few years ago after reading one of the case studies in John Doerr’s OKR book that used YT as an example, I think the point I was trying to make likely still stands https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/writing/okr-youtube-uninte...
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.
Yet, the dystopic future you describe is not 100% there yet.
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.
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?
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.
Let's say I wanted to search for pictures of Ellen Page, which do you think gives more accurate results for the query?
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.
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.
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)
I think you're mocking those who say this is overreach? But the tone is hard for me to be sure about.
In any case, regulation would seem to protect jobs here (jobs of content creators), although what it does to freedoms is much harder to analyse.
I'd encourage you to learn the details. It is equally evil to wrongly dismiss a true accusation as it is to wrongly believe a false one.
https://www.vox.com/culture/2023/9/18/23878706/russell-brand...
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?
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
Sure it's unwelcome, but qualifying to be an aberration requires a bit more than just that.
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.)
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2242
Anyone can argue anything, but Brand might have an uphill slog convincing a trier of fact that YouTube dumped him for being a man.
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.
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.
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.
Are people less likely to buy Nike apparel because for example Tiger Woods was caught with escorts and drinking booze?
I am asking because from a distance it seems not a business decision as much as an opportunity for a CEO to dunk on an athlete/famous person
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.
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.
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.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-66838794
From the article:
> 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).
It basically just means that the average subscriber is watching ~2 of his videos a month.
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 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
Yes: don't watch his videos and don't read or watch news coverage about him.
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? :)
we did not ask for untrustworthy media, algorithms, exploitation and bribery dictate that.
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.
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.
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.
I am having trouble finding something reasonable. e.g.
6.58M youtube subscribers 80 million television households as subscribers for CNN
Although these numbers are not really comparable
~700k daily watchers for CNN: https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/here-are-cable-news-ratings-... 800k video views for Russel: https://socialblade.com/youtube/user/russellbrand
Although of course video views != daily watchers (one person can watch multiple ones & that number can be juiced)
The dude has a video titled Hawaii Wildfire: Climate Change or Blackrock?
His views are only coherent in the sense that he thinks everything is a shadowy conspiracy, which morons gobble up
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.
the little known super-power : spotting bad-faith arguments flawlessly.
"I Support The Current Thing" vs "I Oppose The Current Thing"
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.
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?
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?
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.
And in fact, Google and others profit from this carnage.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/19/arts/russell-brand-youtub...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think it's something we're all vulnerable too.
It's important to be aware of the incentives you're allowing yourself to operate under.
A little tangential maybe, but it reminds me of this book review I really liked: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/books/review/herman-wouk-...
He steered. We should not remove his agency for the content he wrote, said, recorded, and uploaded.
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.
Elon Musk also came out as an alt-right troll when he was tipped that an expose about sexual harassment of a flight attendant was coming his way.
there should probably be a name for it.
e.g. Musk’s companies have done great things in the areas of EVs, batteries, and (most of all) space launches.
…and…
Some of his public-facing behaviour (especially on Twitter) is disturbing, and may be described as ‘alt-right’.
-
(It’s also disturbing that this has to be spelt out; yet here we are.)
Caring about free speech does not make you alt-right, despite mainstream media’s attempts to paint him as such.
Elon and co’s have done more for progressive causes than basically all other companies combined.
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.
You can downvote this all you want but you know there is more than a modicum of truth here.
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.
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, 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'.
Regular men dammit! I can't say it any harder.
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'.
Regular men dammit! I can't say it any harder.
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"
If it makes you feel better to think I don't know what I'm talking about then I can live with that.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/10/russel...
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.
I can give you dozens no problem.
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.
"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.
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.
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.