YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform • Hacker News Board

Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform

#541

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 11:44 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #488

karaterobot wrote: post #243

> “If a creator’s off-platform behavior harms our users, employees or ecosystem, we take action to protect the community,” the spokeswoman said. Putting aside the validity of the accusations—let's say he did everything he's accused of, for the sake of argument—is Youtube alleging that he assaulted Youtube employees, app developers who use the Youtube ecosystem, or Youtube users? I assume the latter. But the thing is,…

Allegedly. If a bunch of people come forward accusing you of assault, odds are pretty good you did it. However, private businesses punishing people for having charges brought against them but not yet tried? That's judge, jury and executioner, which is incompatible with the set of laws that the US is built on - for which the source material was English Law, and precedent even older than that. So an American company pr…

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Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform

#542

Post by ikt » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 11:44 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #476

karaterobot wrote: post #243

> “If a creator’s off-platform behavior harms our users, employees or ecosystem, we take action to protect the community,” the spokeswoman said. Putting aside the validity of the accusations—let's say he did everything he's accused of, for the sake of argument—is Youtube alleging that he assaulted Youtube employees, app developers who use the Youtube ecosystem, or Youtube users? I assume the latter. But the thing is,…

I’m 100% in favor of cleaning house with that generation of musicians and performers that openly preyed on women. But is that what YouTube is doing? When is Aerosmith getting demonetized? https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/steven-tyl... How has it taken YouTube this long, anyway? Hasn’t much of this stuff been openly known for a decade or more? Is YouTube literally just reacting to the media cycle and…

yeah it's odd, if they do it for brand does that mean they'll now do it for all? of course not and they haven't, this feels unusual for them, so why target brand specifically?

this is going to make his conspiracy's seem true like they are targeting him

but it could be as simple as advertisers don't care about aerosmith because it's bigger than steven tyler, whereas brand is purely a youtube based opinion show and he is the main star of the show

Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform

#543

Post by judge2020 » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 11:45 PM UTC

rcarr wrote: post #529

The amount of comments on this that are getting flagged whilst meeting the guidelines is making me question the state of HN as a platform for rational good faith debate. Has tribalism really took over here too?

Have some examples? The few I see are things like victim-blaming (37576676 37576735) or just "innocent until proven guilty" which adds absolutely nothing to the conversation.

Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform

#544

Post by pirate787 » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 11:45 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #505

aidenn0 wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the definition of "punish" that you are implicitly using, private businesses in America used to be able to punish people for anything ("we reserve the right to refuse service to anybody"). Now there are certain things they cannot punish people for (e.g. being black). Are you suggesting that the time has come to mandate that companies may not discriminate against customers for other reasons as well?

I'd rather we sorted out what 'the commons' means in an online context, but failing that? Yes. Because we're essentially privatizing all discourse and those companies can do pretty much whatever they want - as long as they don't piss off other companies too badly (eg, Twitter being demonetized because of Nazis). We've lost the idea of broadcasting in the public interest decades ago, and there's no PBS for the interne…

Your "broadcasting in the public interest" is also "government funded propaganda with limits on free speech"

Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform

#545

Post by turquoisevar » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 11:45 PM UTC

epgui wrote: post #363

JohnMakin wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"innocent until proven guilty" only applies in a court of law. Similar to when people cite the 1st amendment in situations where a private company is taking action, this phrase is meaningless here. A private company can do what it wants within the bounds of the law.

> "innocent until proven guilty" only applies in a court of law 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 a turn of phrase of which the full meaning was implied.

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.

Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform

#546

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 11:47 PM UTC

swores wrote: post #372

bennyschmidt wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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…

[deleted]

Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform

#547

Post by nsajko » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 11:47 PM UTC

curiousllama wrote: post #459

nsajko wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wi…

> Powerful politicians don't get "shunned" for their corruption 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 fee…

> Richard Nixon

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.

Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform

#548

Post by bluedays » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 11:47 PM UTC

While it's not my place to adjudicate his innocence or guilt, the decisions by platforms like YouTube and the BBC to immediately curtail his revenue streams are ethically contentious. Such actions, rooted in the pursuit of reputational safety for these organizations, inadvertently presuppose guilt, potentially skewing public perception and compromising the accused's ability to muster an adequate defense, particularly in terms of securing robust legal representation.

For high-profile figures like Brand, while the financial impact may be substantial, they often have other resources at their disposal. However, for smaller creators, who might be living on the edge, this could be devastating. We need to remember that behind every headline are real people with real lives. Ensuring fairness and empathy in our responses, especially when the stakes are this high, is crucial.

Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform

#549

Post by Manuel_D » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 11:47 PM UTC

jjoonathan wrote: post #253

jtbayly wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mere…

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.

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.

Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform

#550

Post by turquoisevar » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 11:48 PM UTC

JohnMakin wrote: post #101

somenameforme wrote: post #20

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 li…

"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.

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.