The Monetization Window is the new Overton Window. I think people underestimate how much Youtube's monetization policy influences what popular creators put in videos. Because it's not just the money - it also effects how videos are promoted by the algorithm.
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 around maybe many people agree with their decisions on content but what happens if the managers change and the rules change with them? What happens if Andrew Tate types get positions in the corporate? Will people be OK about promoting videos about how you can make money by pimping your girlfriend on live stream and how to recruit more girlfriends and demonetise videos on climate change?
It's very disturbing that those utility level services can pick winners and losers. IMHO, we need to move to a model where if you can moderate content you are liable for the content. If you don't want to be liable for content then you should have nothing to do with that content, just provide the service and cooperate with the law enforcement when they are after someone who posts illegal content.
You can't be the curator and have no responsibility, and if you don't want responsibility don't be the curator.
I'm sorry that you don't like this unpopular opinion 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.
> 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 to each home, and implement ipv6 so you can serve content from your house and not have to depend on bigger companies to get around CGNAT.
This is like saying that if you don't like the planet Earth, find yourself a planet suitable to terraform, go there terraform it, populate it the way you like and live there.
Sure, you can do that but you can also solve the problem at hand. Ownership, money, property etc. are all constructs based on a social contract, Sundar Pichai by himself can't have control on more than a suitcase and a vehicle maybe - he can control Alphabet only because as a society we decided to operate in a certain way and sounds he makes and finger movements he does end up steering giant network of people who interact with other networks of people who happen to have control over some machinery. This means, if the social contract isn't working out we can change that social contract to suits our needs better. One change can be about how computers that transmit videos over TCP/IP should operate.
> This is like saying that if you don't like the planet Earth, find yourself a planet suitable to terraform, go there terraform it, populate it the way you like and live there.
Not at all like that because building a video hosting service is a relatively trivial task, with the only limitation being money. Which the US government has more of than Google.
> Sure, you can do that but you can also solve the problem at hand.
I would rather the government provide the video hosting as a utility rather than commandeer Google’s computers.
Symmetric fibre internet exists in many European countries, and is readily available to a large bulk of citizens in those countries already. I pay $25pm for 500Mbps symmetric today.
I can’t fly to another planet and terraform it. I can (and do) host my own video streams however.
It's not about the tech. Plenty of people could have built Twitter from scratch, but Musk had to pay over $40B to have Twitter and no one came around to offer him to build a Twitter for $39B.
>but Musk had to pay over $40B to have Twitter and no one came around to offer him to build a Twitter for $39B.
As far as I understand, musk offered $40B for Twitter, unprompted. Is there any evidence that he put out offers to build an alternative for $39B? Because I feel like it would have been taken up given the widespread belief that he was overpaying, and even Musk believed that since he tried to back out.
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 be guaranteed to some degree all law abiding citizens.
Edit: I don't think this applies in the case here with Russell Brand and demonitization. There should obviously not be any right to be paid by advertisers.
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.
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.
I don’t think so. Email is low barrier to entry, and a constitutionally protected email account would protect people’s ability to communicate electronically, especially if the government is going to communicate via email with you.
USPS can handle it all. SMS 2FA should also be replaced with something that is legally protected no matter what, so it doesn’t matter if you get blocked by Google/Apple/ATT/Verizon/etc, you can still live your life.
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.
So the solution is to create those “municipal alternatives”. Constitutionally guaranteed electronic money account and ability to receive and send money, constitutionally guaranteed access to internet, email, and identity verification services, provided by the government.
And any abuse should be prosecuted by the government.
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?
And if you don’t moderate at all you get deluged under piles of crap, hate speech, spam, and bot-created garbage. Might as well not even try. In any sort of forum context, zero moderation makes it useless at least for most.
Moderation against abuse of your own system is fine, that's given. Even electricity companies will go after you if you abuse their grid but they won't care what kind of videos you film using their electricity.
However I don't think that YouTube should decide what's hate speech and ban it. If that speech is illegal, the law enforcement should find the person. Maybe it can be acceptable to let the law enforcement delete videos but that's also risky because that's how you can get speech suppression when the government isn't very good.
Hate speech is not illegal in the US. Youtube is not judging what speech is legal or not, they're just making a decision about which types of content they want to distribute.
Then that speech should remain on YouTube and those concern by the content of the speech should simply produce counterarguments and discredit that speech.
I don't know, what about teaching the kids the history of hate they can recognise BS and just don't pay attention to it?
You can't delegate raising your kids to YouTube, right? What about the grown ups you say, well words are not spells - just because someone said that some group of people are sub-human doesn't make others believe that. We are not photocopiers, we are humans.
That hate speech claiming that some group of people are "stain on our planet" will probably claim other stuff like conspiracies and alternative history. Go after those if you are concerned.
> That hate speech claiming that some group of people are "stain on our planet" will probably claim other stuff like conspiracies and alternative history. Go after those if you are concerned.
Wait, so youtube shouldn't go after hate speech, because that's legal in the US, but should go after conspiracies and alternative history, despite those also being legal in the US? This doesn't make sense.
I don't understand then, can you explain where I got it wrong?
madeofpalk said "Hate speech is not illegal in the US. [...]"
to which you responded "Then that speech should remain on YouTube and those concern by the content of the speech should simply produce counterarguments and discredit that speech."
I take this to mean that you think hate speech shouldn't be removed from youtube because it isn't illegal in the US.
Then you said "That hate speech claiming that some group of people are "stain on our planet" will probably claim other stuff like conspiracies and alternative history. Go after those if you are concerned."
I take this to mean that you think people who claim stuff like conspiracies and alternative history are fair game for youtube to "go after". But those things are just as legal as hate speech in America.
Or maybe they were saying, “Don’t argue with an Idiot”. Or were referencing the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle.
If you do want to argue, and correct the grave injustice of someone being wrong on the internet, something like history might be a better topic as you will have more of a basis for argument - although in my experience people can find a way to be obtuse and redirect discussions about anything…sometimes the only winning move is not to play.
It’s not YouTube that’s supposed to go after those, it’s those who have concerns that should go after those who concern them with their speech. That’s the main point of my whole argument.
Anyway, I really don’t enjoy arguing over semantic. If I say I don’t mean that, it means I don’t mean that but it’s possible that I wasn’t articulate enough.
Twitter's community notes works quite well. I don't think that people are incapable of discussion.
IMHO the problem is anonymity combined with some harmful dopamine loop, making people act horribly. Maybe even putting the age of the poster next to the nickname will reduce the heat of the discussion quite a bit.
Have you ever seen the kind of stuff people post on Facebook or on local news sites under their own name, next to their own photographs? These theories about internet civility have been disproven repeatedly over the past decade plus.
Yep. Who was hurt by all that? The problems arise when bunch of incels congregate on some anonymous imageboards or forums.
People saying dumbs stuff with no follow up is never a problem. If anything, they are quite interesting because you can look at those and see what kind of stuff they believe and talk about IRL. There are people analysing those to tackle actual issues because banning it online doesn't stop it from beings discussed in private or small groups.
They were hurt but I’m not convinced that it was due to online posting. IMHO, Facebook was a reflection of what’s happening in real life. FB banning it would not do a thing, maybe change the timing due to the butterfly effect. What they(those who care about Rohingya people) should have done was to use these posts as intelligence about what’s about to happen and take precautions.
You’re just passing the problem off to someone else who won’t do anything about it. Unmoderated sites are cesspools in general. But I guess they’re at least unfiltered cesspools.
> then it's likely that YouTube is pushing cultures to align with SV or some managers in Google.
This is as sure as that the sun will rise tomorrow. I have absolutely no doubt that the rest of the world is culturally influenced by the larger SV companies.
> we need to move to a model where if you can moderate content you are liable for the content.
Hasn't pushing cultural norms on others always been the case with American-centric media? Before silicon valley it was Hollywood. They've got all the big budgets to produce hyperviolent movies but lord help you, if there's an uncovered boob, then it's an R rating and a much tougher pitch to studios.
Modern auction based ad platforms are much less economically sensitive to the pressure of advertiser ethics than traditional ad platforms like cable TV.
If one advertiser pulls out for ethical reasons their placement goes to the next bidder at an infinitesimally smaller price. And at the back of the line there’s always a game developer willing to pay a couple of dollars per install.
This is why the Facebook ad boycotts were so ineffective. Especially compared to the impact of the Twitter ad boycott - with Twitter having never developed a modern auction based platform.
The YouTube “adpocalypse” suggests that YouTube is sensitive to it in a way that google and Facebook aren’t. I don’t know how their ad purchasing system works though.
If that revenue model doesn't work YT should find a new one or seize to exists.
It's not god's given right to run a profitable business, businesses who harm the society and can't find ways to operate at profit without harming the society go out of business all the time.
The answer to that is yes, kind of. Google only really cares what people say in English and perhaps some other major languages. Speech in less common languages is less moderated in general across the internet.
It's not just video content either, Google's been fucking up the whole Internet for a while now.
Do you want a high search ranking for your site? It's far more important to appease Google's algorithms than provide quality content your users enjoy.
Want to make money off Google Ads? You need to be very careful about what you put on your site. They sent me a threatening letter once because I promoted World Naked Gardening Day.
Running a "successful" website nowadays revolves around keeping Google happy. If you fail to do that, they can destroy your business.
This is how ad-subsidized media has always worked. You worked for a television network has a team of censors that protected it from reputational damage. You had to listen to them if you wanted your show to air.
Heh, I bet there is an age gap here in the replies. Older people remember the days of TV/magazines where if you did the wrong thing, suddenly your face disappeared from the media like it never existed. Then the wild west days of the internet was a weird time where there was all kinds of crazy crap on the net. Now we've recentralized the services and it looks like traditional media.
I do not blame Google on this. They are behaving in their business interests exactly the way one should expect. The problem is as a society we grow massive corporations that have large near monopolies over multiple aspects of the internet and think it's perfectly fine.
This is something I think is overlooked very often. I feel like a constant narrative I hear is that censoring media like this is a new-fangled concept when in reality this has been standard practice forever.
Curated vs non-curated content. Apples and oranges.
Why can't social media add flags to accounts? Discusses weapons, discusses police shootings, violence, under accusation of <x>, trans/queer promotion, terf or anti- trans/queer, then advertisers can select which flags they don't want to be associated with?
This is a very interesting point. Tech-media companies (Google, Meta, Tik Tok) increasingly serve a similar gatekeeper function for public discourse that TV networks (ABC, NBC, CBS) did 50 years ago.
You would really enjoy the Chinese internet world, where legions of "gatekeepers" at Bytedance et al. bravely patrol the cyber world and rapidly eliminate any undesirable utterance. It's very clean and reassuring.
I think the main difference is that traditionally, this gatekeeper function was "decentralized". That is, ABC, NBC, CBS, New York Times, The Atlantic, Baltimore Sun, etc. etc. etc. all made their own editorial decisions, and there were dozens – if not hundreds – of decisions being made, rather than just a small handful of them.
This is still true to some extent, but the distribution of stories relies a lot more on a small handful of companies. Previously the distribution (newspaper stands and the like) might also refuse to carry some issues they found particularly objectionably, but again, these decisions were "distributed" much more than it is today, and it didn't affect subscribers of the newspaper or magazine.
Not that the previous system was perfect either or always worked well, or didn't have their downsides, but it's not really the same, IMHO.
Isn't it a bit ridiculous that a guy like that *has to* make his money through YouTube? Make a podcast! Tour! I'm not going to go. I'm trying to spend my money on people who bring value to the world.
Yet, the dystopic future you describe is not 100% there yet.
The monetization window has everything to do with the advertiser confort window. That is "are we alienating a big chunk of the population being associated with that", where big is in dollars, not in people
So it is a lens that distorts what society deems 'acceptable' -- and that phase itself has its own set of complications
Matt Taibbi brought up a case of a guy who put up montages of Trump saying the 2020 election was rigged cut up with clips of liberal media figures saying the Russians stole 2016.
Pure trolling, kind of funny, 100% clips of public figures with no commentary. Demonetized.
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 merely on account of association with the material despite the fact that they made an effort to censor the private pics, but from the emails it was crystal clear that this was because twitter lacked a mechanism to grant special trust to these outlets and not an intentional effort to kill a story (and a sorry nothingburger of a story at that). Revenge porn doesn't typically have a legitimate public interest involved; their infrastructure to deal with this edge case was not well developed.
Ro Khanna (D) was the only Dem in office to wander into the fray and he did it on the side of Free Speech. Interesting how that tends to get omitted from the story.
Thanks, Republicans. You defeated the terrible censorship. Now I know what THEY didn't want me to: Hunter Biden has a huge cock.
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 ban specific individuals advocating against blanket lockdowns.
The notion that Taibbi et al. aimed to show that Biden is some illuminati-like shadow figure ruling the world secretly is a straw man. It did indeed show what it sought out to prove: the government directly and indirectly directed the censorship carried out by large social media companies and often labeled true facts as misinformation.
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.
> 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
This is not at all what was claimed. The focus on the Hunter laptop censorship was on the FBI confirming (or at least strongly suggesting) that the story was disinformation despite the fact that the FBI knew of its veracity. Not due to any string pulling by Biden.
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.
> 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
Incorrect. What Taibbi wrote was that Twitter approached the FBI, asking whether the laptop story was misinformation. The FBI had in fact known that this was a genuine hard drive long before it reached the press (nearly a year before) but nonetheless said that the story was probably a misinformation campaign.
The government leaning on social media was not related to the laptop story. That came later, in 2021, where the government worked through NGO proxies to lean on social media to ban people arguing against lockdowns and even supplying lists of users to ban or suppress.
The 5th Circuit had ample time to review the evidence and found it compelling enough to uphold the injunction. Do you think these judges are just being duped by misinformation?
>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 Twitter files were very specific about the plethora of 3-letter agencies set up to do nothing but make censorship requests. Your claim is a strawman.
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.
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?
> 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, with both organizations directly appealing to Twitter for censorship, making Taibbi’s overall point and particular argument completely accurate.
He swapped them in one particular tweet, quickly corrected, but it was nowhere near "one of the most prominent examples".
Twitter were revealed to have an active relationship with the US government to quash "misinformation" that they didn't like (which turned out to include things that are true but might be helpful to Trump's electoral prospects) while promoting misinformation that the FBI thinks is helpful to them [0].
This is authoritarianism and government corruption of the public discourse. It is hard to tell if it is new (the FBI seems to have had similar relationships with the corporate media since forever ago) but it is profoundly anti-liberty and a real betrayal of the freedom and openness that the tech companies stood up for in the early 2000s.
> And Biden wasn't in office for the laptop stuff but Trump was for the stuff they requested get removed?
While I do think it is less controversial than some people pretend - many politicians appear to have a lot more money than they should - it is naive in the extreme to say that being in office is the major factor when paying off politicians. Joe Bidan has held political offices since 1970s and is a significant force in the Democratic party, the returns on slipping him money would have been quite high whether he is in office or not.
The idea isn't to get a specific couple of lines slipped into a bill, the idea is to guide the long term narrative. Think the difference between quashing a single Jeff Epstein investigation vs covering up the entire scandal over multiple years.
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 stuff but Trump was
I'm not sure what "laptop stuff" you're referring to, but whether Biden, Trump, or whoever else was in office has no bearing on the illegality of the executive actions in question.
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.
Uh, I guess one could phrase it that way but it's rather dishonest.
It'd be akin to saying a police officer testifying that they saw X person shoot Y person as attempting to deplatform X person.
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Honestly the only thing questionable in the twitter files was the USG telling twiter which accounts were their cy-ops accounts so they wouldn't get banned.
Twitter having a policy of you can't do Y on the platform and the USG asking Twitter if X person is violating Y is not illegal censorship.
You understand that USG in reference to the twitter files means Donald Trump as he happened to be in charge of the executive branch during that period?
All governmental prosecution should be before a court with the protection of rights. Even in your contrived example, the defendant has the right to face his accuser, cross-examine, attorneys, judges, juries, and the many things we throw in the government's way of harming people, justified or not.
When the USG tells anyone to do something, chances are they will comply, legal or not, just because it isn't worth the pain and suffering of fighting, especially for someone you don't even know. We have relearning what it is like to have your personal life ruled by people you have never met in places you have never been. The USG has stepped too far and the overreaction to public/private partnerships is coming.
Are you serious? A US District Court as well as the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found that those files were not in fact a joke, and that the federal executive did strong-arm private entities like Twitter to censor.
It's almost certainly fair use. The Copyright Act explicitly allows the use of copyrighted material for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, and the like. Courts have historically been sensitive to First Amendment concerns when copyrighted materials are used for transformative purposes. In Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569 (1994), the U.S. Supreme Court emphasized the transformative nature of parody as a form of commentary, giving it a wide berth under fair use.
Now, onto the crux of your argument about implicit commentary. Even if a work does not contain explicit commentary, the juxtaposition of clips alone can function as a form of critique or commentary. This is especially relevant when highlighting inconsistencies or ironies in public discourse. While there isn't direct commentary, the act of selectively piecing together these clips communicates a larger point or message. Courts often look at the 'purpose and character' of the use, and if it is transformative—adding new meaning or context—it's generally favored under fair use.
Thank you for explaining this. It is obvious if you think about it, but some commenters seem to think copyright can be used as some kind of loophole to shield public figures from exposure of their public behaviour.
You can do that if you want to risk a legal battle, but Youtube doesn't care about your legal battle until its over. The fact of the matter is that footage can be copyrighted and videographers have the right to protect their copyright. If I go film Trump giving a speech with the sole purpose of selling that material to news agencies and you decide to release that footage on your own platform, then you're at risk of infringing on that copyright. The only way to completely decide if you're infringing on their copyright is through a court case. Currently, outside of unique cases like "response videos," it's common for Youtube to side with the copyright owner. So I'm betting Youtube demonetized it for infringing on copyright.
I agree that YouTube will often side with the copyright holder - I’m a Rick Beato fan, and there’s a practical risk of demonetization or removal on that platform. However, it’s crucial to differentiate between what YouTube decides to do and what the actual law permits under fair use. YouTube’s policies don’t necessarily reflect a balanced interpretation of copyright law.
When it comes to copyright law itself, montage videos of politicians that serve a transformative purpose, such as critique or commentary, fit squarely within the realm of fair use, as established by various court precedents. So, while you may face a challenge on platforms like YouTube, the underlying legality of such videos is more accommodating than those platforms might suggest.
No. As someone who works in documentaries, you absolutely have to license footage of public figures, including news footage. There’s a reason most news media shoot their own footage.
If you are commentating on it and making significant changes, then it can be fair use.
The public figure can't copyright their appearance, but whoever recorded the clip absolutely has a copyright on it.
The funniest thing about copyright issues is that whenever they come up, people are so confidently wrong about the actual law. Lots of stuff on YouTube is only permitted because the rightsholders allow it to stay up - every cover of every modern song, for example.
> Lots of stuff on YouTube is only permitted because the rightsholders allow it to stay up - every cover of every modern song, for example.
And many of those rights-holders only allow it because YouTube built a mechanism that helps them detect these uses and then automatically siphon off ad revenue it generates.
I'm honestly confused what people get upset about using a private platform. If you want better accountability argue for an open platform uncontrolled by capital. What is the point of complaining while suggesting nothing? This conversation is even more useless than the old "marketplace of ideas" bullshit.
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 innocent” here. How about waiting till he and his accuser/s have had their day in a court, and jury of peers weighs the evidence and decides his guilt?
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 no such argument for allowing access to YouTube as an advertising platform.
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 unilaterally decide to end the economic aspect of their relationship with the person?
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.
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.
Then break up Google from YT and their ad network. Have more competition in the market. You are going to get exactly the opposite of what you want by having one huge monopoly that's controlled by the government on what they can and cannot say.
>It’s not unreasonable at that point to require it to adhere higher standards of evidence, law, and reason.
Civil law is based on contract. Nearly every civil contract regarding media has disparagement clauses.
> 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.
Good luck taking that up with the department of justice.
I honestly have no clue what you're trying to get at—just because you want a space to be public doesn't change the legal reality.
Problem is that we are at a point at which these 'private platforms' are in a position to do serious damage to public speech primarily due to network effects. They dont become important venues of speech until they are a dominant portion (if not outright monopoly) of communication medium. This is structural & will not be resolved on its own unless some other non-profit seeking entity (Govt) enforces it. As it is we are losing the 'money is speech' battle because of 'Citizen's United' (google it), This left unchecked will just make it hopeless.
It interesting seeing Mr Beast talk about AB testing thumbnails — his old style was apparently not actually what the algorithm wanted but he'd never tested it properly.
There was another style other than him looking stupefied with his mouth open? I'd be fine if that face disappeared off Youtube entirely because everyone seems to have copied that.
Content goes on there based on the promise of money, not the reality of it. If you’ve watched YouTube enough you know how many content producers have come to grips with how much/little money they are actually making and have adjusted their strategy.
I like for instance LTT’s philosophy on merch and patreon as money streams for review oriented content: if the majority or plurality of your sponsorship comes from manufacturers, how can anyone be sure that you’re bringing objectivity to those reviews? How can you be sure you are? So keep sponsors locked into a small pool of your revenue, that way everyone knows you can walk away from them at any time and still keep the lights on. There’s less temptation to even attempt coercion, because the leverage is weak at best.
That's an interesting case. I honestly don't know what is more accurate here: to show more recent photos after the transition or ignore that and mostly show the older photos that reflect the name (but not the person) more accurately.
This is why contract law exists. You can cancel me, sure, go ahead, but you will pay up. With youtube, the contract is written, in the TOS, to 100% favor youtube.
See also "cerveza sickness" for when any discussion about COVID would get you flagged, and any narrative except the latest globalist one was tolerated.
It's really what advertisers are willing to put up with. Unfortunately most companies are run by cowards and I know for a fact that having your ad presented alongside something controversial doesn't imply the brand supports it
Unfortunately, there's a load minority who try to push this when this far from the truth.
