YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform

YouTube don't care as long as it's not publicly known. Hence the community part I suppose?

It's no moral high ground but it's not illogical from that perspective.

With platforms like TikTok also being extremely popular, advertisers may simply choose to focus their budgets on these platforms instead of YouTube.

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...

YouTube should be free to decide who can be on its platform however it sees fit. However, YouTube shouldn’t hold such power over us that when they arbitrarily ban someone it severely harms them.

There are others, but YouTube has the largest audience. That's why Brand chose to use it as his platform. There was never a promise of a continuous business relationship. Things get blurry if YouTube decides to keep serving ads with Brand's videos, but doesn't pay him. They can do it, because that's how they wrote the T&Cs, but it doesn't seem fair. I don't think book publishers stop paying royalties to authors who have been accused of criminal behaviour; they may stop printing their books or even pull the books off the shelves, but the accounts will be settled and there will be no further monetization of the author's content.

"Don't like it? Build your own YouTube"

"Don't like it? Build your own payment processor"

"Don't like it? Build your own anti-DDOS"

"Don't like it? Build your own ISP"

"Don't like it? Build your own..."

The only problem is that your ideal video hosting website doesn't work. You won't:

a) Get enough users because most people want moderation.

b) Raise enough revenue because most advertisers want moderation.

c) Be able to legally operate because most legislators want moderation.

If you want to deal with Youtube, break them in a way that promotes competition instead of having the largest ad company also owning the largest video company. Trying to otherwise restrict their rights has many other bad outcomes for all businesses and individuals.

Who is going to compel Youtube to continue providing those services again?

Since this is obviously not about their "community" but about protecting the brand, I doubt they have put much thought into defining any of the terms in the statement.

We've lost the idea of broadcasting in the public interest decades ago, and there's no PBS for the internet (Just PBS on the Internet)

We should pick one or the other. Either it's fine to discriminate for any reason, or some businesses have a public service obligation and must serve anyone.

And if you are wrong, are you also willing to apologize for hasty decision making? Or will you hide behind the crowd and say 'well everyone else said X!'

Because that's what is happening right now. People's lives are ruined on the assumption of someone being the big bad. Then when it turns out the situation is far more nuanced and delicate, the social damage is already done. Not just the big guys like Brand, who got enough millions to throw lawyer after lawyer at the case should he be innocent, but also the small guys who have a far weaker position socially and financially.

There's long been a principle that the innocent have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Protected class laws exist because, in their absence, too many businesses chose to discriminate against the same groups of people - but surely that reasoning applies even more strongly to discriminating against those accused of serious crimes. (Indeed historically there's a lot of overlap between the two - many lynchings were justified with rape allegations).

> I think that applies more to businesses like banks and payment services providers that can literally make it difficult for you to obtain food and shelter than it does to social media or content hosting platforms, which are relatively easy to self-host.

Realistically there are at most two viable video platforms (and if anyone is to blame for that it's the government, not Brand). If someone can take away your ability to make money they can make it hard for you to obtain food and shelter just as much as if they were refusing to sell food to you.

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.

This weird era... See this is what blows my mind. Like boycotts are not something that's happened pretty much forever. There is currently a particular group that has been bearing the brunt of boycotts due to their socially unacceptable behavior and they seem a little ticked that the power they once unilaterally wielded is now leveraged against them.

???

You are conflating all the different legal systems of the US. US criminal law is the one of beyond reasonable doubt. US civil law on the other hand is an entire other bag of worms and 'potential' contractual obligations. On top of that private property has a pretty massive leeway in reasons you can ban people from said properties. There is no contradiction here. "Fuck you, your tie sucks" is a completely valid reason to remove you from their private property. Said person being a dick to others is what is typically considered an exceptionally valid reason to remove them from the property.

If we want to follow a broad social convention, then it is be nice to others, how about that for a start?

> They ban people when business interests dictate it.

That is the standard. They're a private company. They're offering free services to content creators to host their content. In exchange for an ad partnership and revenue.

But YouTube/Google is the company, and for them this is a business. If they think hosting someone is bad for business they can stop hosting them.

How is it everyone here is so pro-Liberty yet fails to understand that the Libertarian position is that YouTube and the people that run it are free to host or promote whatever content they want that makes them money (as long as it's not against the law), and they can choose to not.

Brand is free to take his content somewhere else.

He is not entitled to YouTube's hosting privileges, and they're not entitled to him hosting his content there.

I think this is pretty much objectively false.

Cops are constantly accused of uneven policing.

Court routinely give lighter sentences for the same crime to different demographics.

Sports are not ruled by the rulebook.

Pretty much every business uses a super vague ToS that do not define concrete rules.

Did you give your kids the Codes of Marcell that they have to abide by? With everything they have to abide by?

Society runs off "at our discretion".

They just want to be seen as “doing something” and if they do it first they seem cooler than other platforms. Didnt deplatform him, just demonetized. They have done this to a lot of other non-mainstream political voices.

That's the way I think about it based upon my perspective and experience.

> Has Brand been convicted of any crime by any government?

Remains to be seen. The police have been "urged" to investigate, according to the AP. Perhaps the "right way to think" hasn't revealed itself yet?

> Seems more accurate to say Youtube is building an alternative security state.

I see no reason to be so certain the government had no involvement in this case, which you would have to be in order to consider this more accurate than literally any other theory.

> Heck, it's rather anarcho-capitalist if you ask me.

Oh.. it's a "cool" way to undermine human society. I didn't realize.

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 than 2.0 GPA.

1. YouTube can show ads BETWEEN videos and keep 100% of the money.

2. YouTube runs ads WITHIN videos if owner "monetizes", and shares the profit.

3. Creators run "promotions" within their videos and keep 100% of the money.

They only stopped #2. Both YouTube and Brand are still both making money off brands videos on YouTube.

It seems pretty clear that there are no in-video ads running on Brand's channel currently. People are welcome to check for themselves:

https://www.youtube.com/user/russellbrand

The video was actually much easier to watch without the blasted YT ads that normally pop up every 5 minutes. And I suppose Brand still gets paid 100% for the embedded promos he narrated and negotiated with the advertisers.

There's partial stuff like Content ID matches. If you post my song, YT still shows ads, but you get no money. I now get your ad money (and YT its cut).

Not sure what they meant in case of Russell Brand, but I bet they will show ads for advertisers who don't opt out and pocket the profit.

Of all the targets to pick, why Brand? Why now?

if companies really cared about humanity, most of them would close shop. Corporate activism is truly scary, as they game the system to acquire virtue to be immune to criticism and even get kickbacks from "aligned" politicians. Fascism 2.0 is really weird

Which say very clearly that they can kick you off at any time for any reason, similar to those “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone” (unless the reason is racism, religion and other protected categories)

In the US, at least, generally only when the act at issue would discriminate on a specific, enumerated, legally protected basis that applies to the business and business transaction in question, and if the business does not have some right (including its First Amendment rights) that trump the specific application of the law in question in the context of the actual act at issue.

The exception is for the fairly narrow set of businesses to which stricter neutrality regulations apply, like phone companies, but that’s a very small set of businesses.

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?

Like Wikipedia? Or like public Square? Or like a government inquest?

All are different. All are also influenced by capital

Then why does Google control my phone? Can't have it both ways

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yet, the dystopic future you describe is not 100% there yet.

Let's say I wanted to search for pictures of Ellen Page, which do you think gives more accurate results for the query?

But he can private the videos at anytime. Even unlisting it would remove all ads while allowing people to find the videos (via links).

Be much more specific, please.

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.

How are we measuring that? Firstly, as a nitpick, the mainstream media these days is Russel Brand. He has an audience comparable to a group like CNN. Possibly slightly larger.

Secondly, the quality of the podcasters is generally better on net than the big media companies. They tend not to be gung-ho all-weather war supporters for example. People like Brand might get a lot of details wrong but have more coherent takes on big issues.

Thirdly, and related to secondly, the podcasters tend to take less money from big entrenched interests in the military-industrial complex or big pharma. They rely less on being spoon fed access to powerful people. It is easier to follow their incentives and style than work out what a media company is trying to push this week.

I think this is especially true when someone is repeatedly ask the same kinds of questions while simultaneously ignoring lots of other really good questions.

the little known super-power : spotting bad-faith arguments flawlessly.

In all cases, reality will catch up to them, and in the long term they will be punished for what they did in the name of short term gains.

The journalist is not like that. His users are the readers, but his customers are the advertisers. And if he is lying and gaining clicks and ad engagement, he is more likely to be called in by his boss for a promotion than a scolding.

I can't help but read this and feel like you must not be familiar with the UK press, particularly the tabloids. The UK tabloids make shit up all the fucking time with next to zero consequences.

For a more US centric take you might want to read Ryan Holiday's book "Trust Me I'm Lying: Confessions Of A Media Manipulator". He goes into specific detail about his time when he was in charge of marketing for American Apparel and how he got US media outlets to write completely bullshit stories for him and others clients like Tucker Carlson to get publicity. There's hardly anyone doing proper fact checking at a lot of these publications anymore, especially on smaller stories, because their print revenues have collapsed since the internet and they're desperately trying to stay afloat.

that is to say : social media isn't innocent, but it's a co-factor in the larger human-dominating infinite search for power and fame.

Caring about free speech does not make you alt-right, despite mainstream media’s attempts to paint him as such.

Elon and co’s have done more for progressive causes than basically all other companies combined.

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.

I honestly have no idea what people are on about when they say stuff like this about "a hostile space for regular men". Like, I just literally have no clue what you mean, no idea what in the world you might be talking about.

"It means you block the monetisation component of the content"

The excuses for not filing a police report of rape at the time rarely withstand scrutiny. The aggrieved have no problems broadcasting their story on social media, but have every excuse prepared for why they can't formally document it within the statute of limitations in a venue that imposes consequences for lying. Go figure.

Heard and Depp were a shitshow though. When two actors take the stand against each other, neither can be trusted. Michael Jackson is a better example.

In most places in the US you can lose your livelihood for any reason or no reason at all, safe for protected classes.

I’d rather see this energy be used to end fire at will and protect employees in general from losing their livelihood on a whim than to use this to pander to celebrities with questionable pasts under the guise of “it could happen to you!”

There are times it is very difficult to not be inflammatory on hacker news. Statements like this saying some new precedent is being set are are wild. Like have we even been on the same planet up till this point levels of cognitive dissonance.

Last week if the local paper would have written an article about one of one your co-workers being accused of sexual assault on a minor, and that the company "released them from duties the next day", you would have told me "Oh, that's the way it's always been, you don't want a rapist working for the company". In any right to work state accusations of impropriety are enough to terminate work contracts, end of story. But suddenly someones golden cow got tarnished and now we want something done?

He could get banned from all social media and he would still be able to support himself.

Any party to a transaction should be able to revoke consent to the transaction at any time with or without cause.

If you are a programmer and you work for me and I fire you, I have not destroyed your ability to support yourself. I've only removed your ability to do business with me.

Freedom of association is powerful and important.

If your sole source of income comes from YouTube, a private enterprise you freely chose to contract and enter into a binding agreement with which affords them the right to do this, then this is a risk you run.

Brand, like everyone, is free to monetise his content on platforms with different perspectives on acceptable creator conduct, or to monetise his content directly. The specific transaction which he is entering into with YouTube is that he will benefit from their large audience viewing his videos, and if people watch those videos, YouTube and he will benefit from advertising running against the videos. Brand does not have any de facto right to broadcast to YouTube's audience, which I would imagine they consider to be proprietary and valuable -- exactly the sort of thing you wouldn't want, for example, associating your brand with individuals credibly accused of rape.

> And so we should appreciate what a serious action that is, to turn it off. It's not like it's just play money, that we can pretend it doesn't matter. It's real income.

It's a serious course of action but that does not mean it's unfair on Brand. He was already warned when he -- a standup comedian with identical bona fides to a goldfish -- espoused discredited unscientific nonsense during COVID. It was fair then, and it's fair now.

Here's why in general terms: NSVRC estimates that 63% of all sexual assaults are not reported to the police. You likely know the reasons for this, but just in case: fear of not being believed, low prosecution/conviction rates, frequently insurmountable burden of proof given the specific nature of most rapes, the fear of an extended criminal trial, victims blaming themselves or in some cases (including one of Brand's accusers) not wanting to admit that they were raped (easier when many violent sexual assaults are not the cartoon example of a man in a balaclava in the park, but someone you know and had previously trusted).

I presume that you accept that there are, in general, many women who are raped and simply do not come forward, and that the passing of time in such cases does not in any way diminish their claim?

More specifically, in California, the law reflects this uneasy reality for victims: from 2017 onwards, there is no statute of limitations on rape accusations. It's not possible for the criminal standard of proof to be changed to account for the fact that, axiomatically, rapes are difficult to prove, therefore the state grants an unlimited amount of time to come forward, which gives prosecutors the benefit of being able to build the most robust case possible.

Proving criminal actions beyond reasonable doubt literally means that the court/jurors find the evidence so compelling that no reasonable person could conclude anything other than guilt. And in a similar fashion, California's penal code seems designed to say that no reasonable person could find a decade passing between a rape and the victim coming forward as relevant to the credibility of the claims.

It's simply settled at this point: coming forward about a rape is a brutally unfair, hard, and thankless task. That's why the vast majority of victims do not come forward. That's why it's important that we understand what it means to "believe women": it doesn't mean that we abandon legal principles and convict men at the whim of their accusers, it means that we collectively create an environment in which the victims of serious, life-deranging, deeply personal, embarrassing, hard-to-prosecute crimes are not given yet another reason to do nothing by people who don't seem to understand that there are vastly fewer false accusations of rape than there are unreported ones. It needs to work the other way around.

This is an illusory rebuttal. You seem to be insinuating that history shows there to be a significant chance that these accusations will be "far less" than the initial reporting "or flat out wrong", without providing any evidence in support of your claim.

> Your deference to the professionalism of journalism is about a decade or two out of touch with modern reality.

Here is a list of all the times I mentioned "journalism" or "journalists" in my post which you replied to. I would be grateful if you would enumerate which makes you think I am affording undue deference to the profession, bearing in mind that OP is suggesting that the media concocted this story and that the use of "actors" in its retelling is somehow evidence of its incredibility:

1. "[These are not anonymous allegations.] The newspaper and television channel know the identities of the individuals, as does Brand."

2. "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."

3. "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."

4. "it is absolutely the de facto standard in journalism to protect the identity of [the victims of serious crimes] with a mixture of actors and altered voices."

> It is only rational to wait for proper processes play out.

I'm sorry if you thought I was suggesting that "proper processes" were not playing out. In fact, I believe that private businesses which entered into contractual relationships with Brand are free to use the rights those contracts afford them to distance themselves from him, given the seriousness of the allegations against him.

> It’s sad that such a thing has become politicized

It isn't political except to say that the people defending Brand appear to be, overwhelmingly, fringe and far right figures who espouse similarly discredited views and are now joining dots which most of us don't see: this is not an endorsement of Brand's guilt, but Occam's Razor suggests that a man who bragged for decades about his relentless and at times violent sexual appetites, and who is accused of rape by multiple independent accusers with – again – reams of evidence _including a series of messages from Brand in which he appears to apologise for raping one of them_ is, simply, a rapist who happens to have the same nonsense views as a lot of those supporting him.

> one has to feel the need to tar and feather someone at the first reporting of accusations and any dissent of immediate overreactions is dismissed as conspiratorial

If you believe that the credibility of investigative journalism is in some way undermined by the use of actors to protect the identities of victims, or that a decade passing between the alleged crimes and the victims coming forward is suggestive of anything other than it being very, very scary and humiliating to come to terms with and be open about being raped, then you deserve to be dismissed in the harshest possible terms. It's simply another conspiracy theory masquerading in a not-very-compelling disguise.

> or itself motivated by a distasteful political agenda or merely getting their information from unclean sources.

That's what it boils down to, though. Assuming, for example, that you do not believe the earth to be flat, you have to rationalise and account for the fact that there are people who do sincerely believe it to be. My armchair assessment of such individuals is that they are probably somewhat predisposed to such beliefs (in my experience it's a rare thing to find a conspiracy theorist who believes just _one_… for example OP seems to be supporting Brand's discredited fringe theories about big pharma, and now believes the equally inane and vanishingly unlikely theory that Brand is being falsely accused in order to silence him), but also that their faith in the public institutions which overwhelmingly do more good than harm (serious news organisations, public bodies such as NIH and the WHO, colleges, etc.) has been eroded to the point where they seek out laughably ill-informed "news" sources like Brand and Rogan.

Is the implication that majority of cases or a large enough minority have been flat out wrong? If yes, then please cite your source.

This was what early internet was like: Usenet, IRC, etc.

They choose platforms with moderation (aka censorship) and stay away from those that don't.

https://www.npr.org/2021/04/05/984440891/justice-clarence-th...

You want to show your content on the internet? Start your own hosting service or find one that will allow your content. Nobody owes you anything.

Users don’t want the responsibility of filtering out CP, gore, sexual violence, etc. I would bet the average user actively wants that content suppressed. Just look at any of the cases of social media moderators developing PTSD from their work.

The morality in this instance does not follow this principle. If people find these allegations credible—and most should—the morally correct action is to deplatform him and delete his content.

Once you venture into private parties evaluating other private parties, you encounter a collision of rights. It's still freedom of speech and association to not want to do business with certain people, and as long as those certain people aren't of a protected class, this falls well within the moral concepts of both free speech and presumption of innocence.

That meaning being “the concept of innocent until proven guilty is only universally applicable in a court of law”.

So unless your psyche has any force beyond itself or it happens to be a court of law, your gotcha lacks any meaningful effect.

Beyond you grandstanding that is.

This is not currently a legal matter, but a matter that concerns a public figure's ethical standards. Multiple independent lines of evidence is a powerful thing.