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YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform

nytimes.com

611–620 of 1001 posts

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

#611

> “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,…

What kind of weird lawyerly nitpicking is this. YouTube does not want to be associated with an alleged rapist. Is that so hard to understand.

They don't want to be associated with him... but they do want to be associated with the ad revenue his content generates.

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

#614
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…

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 kno…

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.

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

#615

Anonymous allegations from more than a decade ago, procured by a fishing reporter, should not lead to the cancellation of someone's means of supporting themselves. This is absurd, regardless of whether the accusations are ultimately true or not. Beyond the absurdity, this is tyrannical. Even the "testimony" they released was recorded by an actor. There's simply very little of substance here.

Your comment seems either mistaken or disingenuous to me:

> Anonymous allegations

The identity of the alleged victims is not public, but that is not the same thing as an anonymous allegation. The newspaper and television channel know the identities of the individuals, as does Brand.

> from more than a decade ago

Utterly irrelevant.

> procured by a fishing reporter

It's unclear what you mean by this. I can't find anything in any of the stories which suggests that the journalists simply began investigating him hoping to find a story or promulgate the misapprehension that he is a rapist. In fact, the Times' investigation seems to insinuate that the 16 year old Brand was dating when he was 31 approached his publisher seeking an apology before being rebuffed. That seems to me to be the most likely origin for the investigation.

> should not lead to the cancellation of someone's means of supporting themselves

Suspension without pay is extremely common whilst investigations of serious misconduct in or outside of the workplace are carried out, but even if that weren't the case: YouTube is not Brand's employer, he chooses to publish on their platform [presumably] knowing the terms of service, and is not beholden to YouTube as his only source of income. After he was "censored" by YouTube during COVID for espousing inane conspiratorial drivel, he began posting on a service called "Rumble", not to mention the royalties and residuals he still receives from his previous work and of course not forgetting his option to use one of his myriad other platforms (or indeed YouTube's, if it's within the ToS) to encourage his brainless fans to remunerate him directly or via other means.

> This is absurd

Even your straw man retelling of this situation is fairly benign-seeming.

> this is tyrannical

Lol.

> Even the "testimony" they released was recorded by an actor.

You could be forgiven for not knowing this if you get all of your news from Elon and Russell Brand, but it is absolutely the de facto standard in journalism to protect the identity of individuals with a mixture of actors and altered voices. If you watch the Channel 4 documentary you will note that at times they use the real people, with altered voices, and at times they use actors.

None of this undermines the credibility of the reporting or the accusations, and -- again -- the identities of the individuals in the reporting are known to both the journalists and Brand, and the police know the identity of the _further_ individual who came forward in light of the allegations to make _another_ accusation.

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

#616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm subscribed to hundreds of channels, and I rarely see their content in my feed. It is so bizarre.

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.

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

#618
post #67

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?

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.

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

#619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

That further centralizes, makes matter worse.

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.

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

#620

> “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,…

> But the thing is, a majority of people on Earth are Youtube users, so what the heck does that even mean? This is beside the point, but I want to bring it up because I think it's important to remember we live in a bubble. A majority of people on earth are not Youtube users. Only ~60% of the world's population uses the internet[1], and of those, I'd assume a significant portion lack the bandwidth to stream video. Als…

So Youtube will demonetize you if you hurt someone with an internet connection, but not if you hurt someone too poor to afford one?
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