YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform
251–260 of 1001 posts
Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Twitter Files were precisely what Taibbi said. The USG telling social media companies which people should have their speech censored.
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?
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files#Nos._6-7:_FBI_co... Releases 6, 7, 8, 9 & 10 being particularly interesting.
Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
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The Twitter Files were precisely what Taibbi said. The USG telling social media companies which people should have their speech censored.
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.
Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform
#254I wish there was a viable alternative to everything Google (search, youtube, android, maps to name a few). I can't wait for Elon to buy Google and end this BS.
this is your solution? for Elon to buy Google?
Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What's the long-term reality catch-up mechanism in the social media space?
In this and other examples, getting deplatformed and losing your sources of income.
Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe this should be reconsidered when a "private company" controls a large majority of humanity's social fabric and/or popular culture?
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.
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".
Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
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> The Twitter files were an absolute joke. 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 suspect is going to be overturned at the Supreme Court.
Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform
#258Putting 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 outr…
Audience capture is a scary thing: https://gurwinder.substack.com/p/the-perils-of-audience-capt... (a particularly sad and grotesque example).
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-...
Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform
#259The Monetization Window is the new Overton Window. I think people underestimate how much Youtube's monetization policy influences what popular creators put in videos. Because it's not just the money - it also effects how videos are promoted by the algorithm.
I wonder if YouTube takes into consideration local values when doing this. For example, nudity and other controversial stuff can have much different standards on what's acceptable and what's not. If this is not baked into the formula, then it's likely that YouTube is pushing cultures to align with SV or some managers in Google. I'm not going to defend Russel Brand, just making a point about YT's impact. This time aro…
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.
Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What's the long-term reality catch-up mechanism in the social media space?
Through neglect, passive sabotage, and active direction, our society degrades to the point that NO ONE can make clickbait content.