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Comment by SkyMarshal | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

Alleged rapists.

Is that even true? Are there no convicted rapists with monetized youtube channels? Youtube does background checks? Or they merely take action when someone's crime(s) make it into the news? That seems rather arbitrary and short-sighted. Some journalist or cabal of journalists can write a viral article about someone, about something that happened a decade or more ago, and a corporation will 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.

Now do Twitter.

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