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YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform

nytimes.com

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

#561

Post by QuantumG »

Dig1t wrote: post #379
0xDEF wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He pulled an Elon. 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.

The Twitter Files revealed pretty definitively that government censorship was taking place. 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.

How's that?

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

#562

Post by jjoonathan »

woooooo wrote: post #333
jjoonathan wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Taibbi specifically had tons of meeting notes on "alignment" between twitter's content policy team and people from DOJ, FBI, etc. Yes, Trump was president at the time.

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.

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

#563

Post by bluedays »

judge2020 wrote: post #543
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.

Your observation underscores a fundamental challenge in public discourse: determining which contributions substantively further a conversation. While the repeated mentions of "innocent until proven guilty" or instances that may appear as victim-blaming can feel redundant or unproductive to some, for others, these comments might encapsulate deeply held beliefs or concerns. Recognizing this, it's crucial to appreciate the multiplicity of perspectives.

However, true progress in any debate relies on a collective willingness to delve deeper, to move beyond surface-level assertions and to engage with the nuanced complexities of the issue at hand. Dismissing certain viewpoints as merely "adding nothing" can inhibit this deeper exploration. We should endeavor to foster an environment where contributors feel empowered to expand upon their initial sentiments, illuminating the reasons behind them. Only then can we bridge understanding and foster a richer, more productive dialogue.

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

#564

Post by turquoisevar »

nvm0n2 wrote: post #191
yellow_postit wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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. 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 chie…

You gotta love conspiracy theorists.

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.

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

#565

Post by miguelazo »

blibble wrote: post #512
turquoisevar wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube has been doing this for a while. If you’re just starting out and don’t qualify to become a “partner”, you can’t monetize your videos until you reach X amount of subscribers and Y amount of watch hours. This doesn’t mean your videos won’t have ads on them. They most assuredly will have ads on them. It just means that YouTube doesn’t consider you good enough to share the revenue with you. Load of BS of course.…

operating the service isn't free and there's going to be some fixed cost component of introducing a new partner arrangement as long as the number isn't too high I don't really see a problem with it

Given the scale and metrics involved, seems pretty nominal. Maybe not free, but for the context might as well be. Something that could be highly automated if it were transparent and fair.

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

#566

Post by jjoonathan »

Manuel_D wrote: post #549
jjoonathan wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#567

Post by ThatPlayer »

fallingknife wrote: post #474
pseudosavant wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YT most certainly runs ads against demonetized content. They just don't share in the take with the creator. What a principled stance... "I will make even more money because you did something bad somewhere else!"

Well so much for the "we censor because of the advertisers demands" excuse for their censorship then.

There's a bit more nuance to that. Some advertisers can choose to put ads on videos that are labelled undesirable. But because there's less advertiser demand for ads on such videos, they're generally very cheap.

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

#568

Post by SkyMarshal »

fallingknife wrote: post #431
SkyMarshal wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inn…

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 n…

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.

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

#569

Post by anigbrowl »

cgio wrote: post #325
jmfldn wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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' a…

I cannot see how the army would be of any use in the eventuality of the major expose. There was this other person with huge following among scepticals of everything (sorry I don't remember the name exactly) who got a huge fine recently. I don't believe justice would look the other way, if anything, it may be attracting scrutiny with attention.

Money, PR, astroturfed protests, moral support. This can be true even for people in prison in legally non-controversial cases of murder. Quite a few serial/mass killers have fan clubs. I don't mean true crime nerds who happen to be interested in a particular villain, I mean literal fan clubs that write regularly, put money in the prison commissary account, recruit other fans and so on.
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