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YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform

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

#931

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't really matter what their argument is, they simply need to have one. It's their sandbox, and they have chosen an advertiser-friendly ratchet as the driver of policy. YouTube will get more and more bland and samey as people fear the banhammer, which will get used on less and less extreme content and producers, as the "cancelling machinery" has been built and will always find the next-most-evil^tm on which to…

>In England and Wales, more than 99% of rapes reported to police do not end in a conviction. This is the result of a criminal justice system that makes prosecuting rape extremely rare, lengthy and difficult. https://www.city.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2022/04/new-scor... An alternative interpretation of what's going on here is that the mainstream justice system is failing, and people are cobbling together an alternat…

There's a word for that: vigilantism, a word not usually associated with fairness, accountability, or proportionate punishment. That there are voices here that suggest private punishment administered without accountability or due process is, to quote the parent poster, "a good thing" should worry us all.

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

#932

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Has Brand been convicted of any crime by any government? No, he's punished without the due process of law. And that's how most dictatorial regimes usually deal with miscreants. If you bad-mouthed Breznev nobody would bother with a show-trial unless there was some specific benefit of making you an example. In 9/10 cases they'd fire you from any semi-decent job and won't let your kids finish high school with more tha…

Let's check for political bias here. Suppose I rewrote your comment so instead of talking about Russell Brand, I'm talking about the right-wing Budweiser boycott. Those right-wingers are punishing Budweiser without due process of law. Just like most dictatorial regimes. How worried are you?

These are not comparable scenarios.

In the first, a massive multinational corporation is singling out an individual for punishment based on nothing more than accusation.

In the second, individual consumers are punishing a multinational corporation that explicitly expressed open contempt for them as people.

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

#933
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Zuckerberg said that the FBI pressured Facebook over Hunter Biden, you can look it up if you want another datapoint. Anyone who votes on Hunter Biden's personal habits is a dummy but there was definitely a coordinated campaign to call it "disinformation" despite the dude's actual dick being in the pictures.

Are you talking about on Joe Rogan? He didn't say that at all. He said they later assumed they were talking about the laptop from something they said earlier that was much more general about upcoming Russian misinfo.

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

#934

> “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,…

All this doesn't matter. There is a Social Credit System and Scoring that is implicitly implemented in the Land of the Brave and Free. If you anger the Lords of The Traditional Orthodoxy by shaking your Chains, they will ensure that Sufficient Character Assassination is carried out to reduce your score to pitiful levels. Once that is done, you are deemed as Unfit For Society and then slowly Cancelled and Censored Out Of Existence.

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

#935
post #909

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just in terms of viewership do you have a specific source for saying his audience is comparable? I am having trouble finding something reasonable. e.g. 6.58M youtube subscribers 80 million television households as subscribers for CNN Although these numbers are not really comparable ~700k daily watchers for CNN: https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/here-are-cable-news-ratings-... 800k video views for Russel: https://social…

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/02/business/media/cnn-profit... or https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2023/03/14/cnns-rat... for example - CNN is pulling a viewership of ~400k people and you can see Brand's videos generally averaging above that on YouTube.

I agree this points to a somewhat similar level of reach, but you can't actually compare views to viewership

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

#936

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…

Ignoring the fact that there were concerted efforts by people in various government branches to attack and get rid of Trump while he was president makes your argument silly.

Just because Trump was in office doesn't mean his political enemies in the government were unable to use their governmental powers to censor speech that would help Trump get reelected.

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

#937
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

https://www.leefang.com/p/house-democrat-threatens-twitter > Taibbi has admitted mistaking CIS for CISA in a single tweet in one of his many threads, but his testimony to Congress was entirely different. Hasan deceptively conflated this quickly corrected tweet with Taibbi’s testimony. > But the evidence shows that Taibbi’s congressional remarks were correct. CIS and CISA collaborated with EIP on moderation requests,…

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

#938
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> it was a nongovernmental agency Several "non-governmental" agencies (like the Election Integrity Partnership or the Stanford Internet Observatory[0]) were involved in making recommendations to censor. I say "non-governmental" in quotes because entities like SIO receive a lot of federal funding, and key players shuttle back and forth between private and government functions. > Biden wasn't in office for the laptop s…

Didn't EIP not apply for/receive federal grants in that timeframe (why put non-governmental in quotes wrt to them?

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

#939

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"government oversight" sounds ominous. Personally, I wouldn't mind if the judicial branch was in charge of arbitration. These companies are not obligated to pay creators. They pay them because it's profitable, and the moment money exchanges hand and someone livehood depends on them, the relationship changes. At that point, if you leave creators without recourse, you only changed labels and left workers without hundre…

This is a good point that I don’t see very often. Video producers who have an explicit (or even an implicit) agreement with YouTube and depend financially on the earnings that it provides are not just “creators” who can “go somewhere else”. Surely, one could say that to any worker: don’t like the job? Go somewhere else. And still we have fought so hard for labor rights that give employees more agency and some level of protection against abuse.

Makes me think whether receiving regular earnings from any online service should legally redefine the relationship between the user and the service to something closer resembling an employment contract.

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

#940
post #754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This has never been the standard for businesses. "Innocent until proven guilty" is only applicable in criminal court. OJ didn't keep his endorsements after he murdered Nicole and Goldman, he lost them well ahead of the trial, and the businesses shouldn't have been forced to continue them because he was a toxic asset even after he was found not guilty.

Russel Brand is not a spokesman for YouTube though. Nor is a gay couple a spokesman for a photographer.

Some photographers offer a discount if they can use your pictures. If you don’t want to feature “gross boys kissing each other” or a Star Trek themed wedding in your portfolio, fine, or not fine actually, but whatever. However it’s getting a little late in the day to still want to shun people because of who they sleep with (consent and ability to give consent notwithstanding).

I typed “avoid” but changed it to “shun” because I find there’s an important difference between not wanting to hang out with cosplayers or gay men and not selling them a cake that you don’t even have to be present for. And who the hell knows who made your wedding cake anyway? Really? Is that even a thing? I’ve only had one wedding and we kept it as simple as possible so we could spend more on the honeymoon. We might have sprung for a cake from the fancy bakery. In fact now that I say that I think we did. But it wasn’t a defining moment, as evidenced by the fact that it took me a while to remember that happened. I know the place we had the ceremony, and the reception. And the bad photographer’s assistant with the broken flash mount that kept falling over and ruining her shots. Fuck the cake. My cake didn’t define my wedding and definitely didn’t define the shop, which is the point here. We were just two stupid kids buying a cake.

People have gotten crazy about weddings. So I’ll allow there’s ample space between “reasonable human” and “actual human” to get up to mischief.

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