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

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

#401

Post by Waterluvian » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 10:31 PM UTC

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.

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

#402

Post by josefx » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 10:32 PM UTC

wilg wrote: post #163

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…

Is it even "the algorithm" or is it simply just how people prefer to click crazy shit? We see it with news and pretty much anything else where clicks equal money.

I think the algorithm simply suffers the same problem as googles search algorithm: it was gamed years ago. I usually have to block a dozen or so of crazy or low effort content farms for every type of content I watch on youtube and after that the recommendations seem mostly acceptable.

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

#403

Post by swores » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 10:32 PM UTC

JumpinJack_Cash wrote: post #74

Question to anybody who works in advertisement: Are people less likely to buy Nike apparel because for example Tiger Woods was caught with escorts and drinking booze? I am asking because from a distance it seems not a business decision as much as an opportunity for a CEO to dunk on an athlete/famous person

Most people: no. Some people: yes.

If Tiger Woods was the only way Nike could think of advertising then they likely would've considered him worth keeping, but when they have so many alternative good options for sponsorships it tips the balance in favour of not sponsoring somebody that even 0.1% of your customers might think badly of you for.

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

#404

Post by nomel » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 10:32 PM UTC

pixelat3d wrote: post #326

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…

Your assumption is the reason his content was removed was because of the allegations, which is potentially not true. While it's very likely the allegations are what drew attention to it, it doesn’t mean there wasn’t a bunch of stuff there already that violated policies – especially given the content he had doubled down on. All Youtube did was cite their “Creator responsibility“ clause[1] as the reason. This could hav…

> there wasn’t a bunch of stuff there already that violated policies

Are you suggesting that it could be that his existing videos were in violation of community guidelines? Is there any evidence for this? I've watched some of his videos, and this seems like a rather silly accusation.

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

#405

Post by seydor » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 10:33 PM UTC

Google is not a monopoly. Youtube is not a monopoly. Google ads is not a monopoly.

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

#406

Post by gooseus » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 10:33 PM UTC

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'll make one point, which is that if you are a violent asshole who punches anyone in the face that looks at you wrong, you still can't actually harm anyone through Youtube except by trying to convince someone to come get their ass kicked by you.

Russel Brand is accused of grooming a 16 year old girl while he was 31, if true, that means there is the very real possibility that Brand could be using the YT platform as a means for finding other victims.

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

#407

Post by mschuster91 » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 10:34 PM UTC

christkv wrote: post #348

surfingdino wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I doubt YouTube worries about being demonetized by advertisers at this point. Where exactly will this advertisers go to advertise on long form videos otherwise?

> I doubt YouTube worries about being demonetized by advertisers at this point.

They've been the target of that twice at least, in 2017 over hate speech [1], in 2019 over pedos[2]. Large brands spend insane amounts of money on advertising, and they do not want their content to appear next to people facing allegations of sexual misconduct or otherwise bad behavior.

Hell just look at Twitter and how much advertising income they lost in the matter of a few months [4], as brands didn't want their ads to show up next to actual Nazis [3]. And instead of recognizing this and getting rid of the Nazis, Musk wants to sue the ADL [5].

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/24/15053990/google-youtube-a...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jilliandonfro/2019/02/21/advert...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/06/twitter...

[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66217641

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/05/elon-musk...

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

#408

Post by gerdesj » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 10:34 PM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #357

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…

> Inevitably though, the algorithm steered the videos to become more clickbaity, divisive, and frankly crazy. "The algorithm" didn't force him to go off the crazy deep end. He chose to do this himself. Don't absolve him or that decision. I think it's more like, he knew this was coming out and it was going to make him look bad, so he preemptively decided to modify his audience to consist of people less likely to leave…

"I think it's more like, he knew this was coming out and it was going to make him look bad, so he preemptively decided to modify his audience to consist of people less likely to leave him once the news did break."

The accusations mainly seem to be from around a decade ago (give or take). How long do you have him down "modifying" his audience?

I personally think ... well I don't know the bloke at all, only his public persona. However we are seeing an outrageous pseudo trial by media (all of them) and ill-informed public "opinion" before he is even in the dock facing his accusers. How on earth can he face 12 unbiased jurors with this bloody nonsense going on?

Perhaps we should adopt a professional approach to trying crime, involving trained magistrates instead of the old school "12 men and true" bollocks. The jury system doesn't really cut it these days in the face of your and other shrill accusations. I gather that the Netherlands does that, for example.

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

#409

Post by serf » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 10:34 PM UTC

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.

playing devil's advocate here for a moment : having that 'army' would eventually be useful if say you knew an exposé was on the way because they may become an exploitable market once the mainstream throws you to the wayside over the allegations.

the 'army' can be fed some insider-flavored tripe : "THEY are using this to get me.", "Of course this comes out when i'm trying to expose the truth", etc etc.

So, in other words, the 'army' isn't directly useful against the allegations necessarily, but as a fall cushion once those allegations and possible criminal charges land and alienate the rest of the 'normal' public from you.

Alex Jones/Sandy Hook comes to mind. In some warped sense, the criminal allegations and justice pursuit towards Alex Jones with regards to his comments regarding the Sandy Hook shootings cemented him as a 'victim of the system' for a lot of his adherents; much to the dismay of everyone else.

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

#410

Post by lotsofpulp » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 10:34 PM UTC

pseg134 wrote: post #378

lotsofpulp wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Then why were you crying the other day that the US needs to nationalize SpaceX to help Ukraine? Can’t they just built their own space based internet network?

I do not recall commenting on that topic at all.