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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

#821

Post by corethree »

surfingdino wrote: post #308
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,…

YouTube doesn't want to be demonetized by advertisers, so they are demonetizing Brand. It's basic reputation management / income stream protection. Brand is free to go elsewhere or set up his own streaming / video publishing service.

>Brand is free to go elsewhere or set up his own streaming / video publishing service.

Obviously there's problems with this reasoning right? Why bother mentioning pointless rationalization here? You and Youtube both know there's only one video service that offers long form format and that's youtube themselves.

Just tell it like it is. Youtube having a monopoly over online video content is effectively gagging and censoring Brand because of the alleged crimes influencing their business. It is not technically eliminating freedom of speech but it is both practically and effectively doing the same thing.

This points to a an overall problem within the US today regarding freedom of speech. We effectively do not have freedom of speech because all public speaking platforms are controlled by business interests.

That's what's going on here. Not some "oh you're free to go to another video service" bullshit.

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

#822

Post by benjaminwootton »

Waterluvian wrote: post #401
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,…

They’ve calculated that this is the right business decision. There is never anything more than that with corporations.

I think that’s a good way to look at these things. I went through a phase of getting angry at online censorship. In reality, I don’t think corporations will be spending much time debating morals and will simply look at their reputation and bottom line.

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

#823

Post by diogenes4 »

harshreality wrote: post #646
fallingknife wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Alleged rapists. 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 unilaterall…

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.

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

#824

Post by musicale »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #436
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,…

> 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…

2.7B youtube users is about 1/3 of the people on Earth, and a solid majority of internet users.

India has the most youtube users at 570M+, though the US is highest in youtube traffic. Japan also has high youtube traffic per capita.

https://www.globalmediainsight.com/blog/youtube-users-statis...

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

#825

Post by brigandish »

JohnMakin wrote: post #698
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 existe…

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.

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

#826

Post by a2800276 »

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,…

>we take action to protect the community,” the spokeswoman said.

This really exposes Google's hypocrisy, though. If they were worried about protecting the community, surely they would remove his content and not his ability to monetize it.

They must mean that "community" is being harmed by the content and not by the ads (else the responsible thing would be to shut down altogether ...)

That said, I think Brand's videos are a big pile of barf, though again, if that were the standard, YouTube would have to throw out 90+% of their content...

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

#827

Post by shitlord »

the_doctah wrote: post #748
palmer_fox wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, finally a trustworthy unmanipulated search engine coming from an honest uncensored country.

Hey, at least it ain't Google. Let's say I wanted to search for pictures of Ellen Page, which do you think gives more accurate results for the query?

I just tried this. Most of the pictures on a google image search for "ellen page" are actually Ellen and not Elliot.

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

#828

Post by ulizzle »

pixl97 wrote: post #674
ulizzle wrote: post #635

So what happens if the allegations turn out to hold no weight? Does he get his channel back and the bureaucrat NPCs self-flagellate with hashtag mea culpas? I suppose not The culture wars are out of control

Do you get your job back if your 'right to work state' if your accused of being a sexual predator and your job fires you... no, you do not. Tomorrow everyone will be back at 'right to work' and 'freedom of association' around here on some other topic.

If you are accused, you don't lose your job; proof must be there first. Otherwise, you can sue for wrongful termination, and there will be hell to pay in dollars. HR's job is to protect the company first, so unless they catch someone in the act, they won't know or want to know unless it comes from you or the cops.

But this is different because it's politics and a public person. It's different rules for them. Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard is an excellent example of how easily the mobs can be misled and manipulated.

I don't think it's fair that allegations can destroy a man's life just because he's famous, but that's how the cosmic cookie crumbled.

Technically, YouTube should only be able to demonetize Russel Brand once he's proven guilty, but pointing out hypocrisy makes one very unpopular nowadays

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

#829

Post by whatwhaaaaat »

jmfldn wrote: post #285
c7DJTLrn wrote: post #143

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 outr…

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 love this one and it was all over Reddit.

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.

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

#830

Post by vmladenov »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #238
mrtksn wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

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.

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