YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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, a majority of people on Earth are Youtube users, so what the heck does that even mean?
I have no dog in this fight, Russell Brand's fate is not of interest to me. I'm just wondering about the argument they are making, and how broad it seems. If any alleged crime takes place wherein the victim has watched at least one Youtube video at some point in their life, and the perpetrator has a monetized Youtube channel, will Youtube's policy be to step in and protect the victim? For example, if I am YT creator and I punch someone in a bar, and that someone has a Youtube subscription, does Youtube step in? That feels like the kind of policy that cannot be faithfully and objectively executed, which makes it a bad policy and a potential legal vulnerability for Youtube.
I don't think it matters if the other person has a YT subscription. If you create videos about, say, beekeeping and you get in a random bar fight, no, probably not. IF you're some sort of 'influencer' and your public persona is all about being a tough-talking badass, such that your getting into a bar fight makes you the Main character in the entertainment/gossip pages for several days, then they might dump you because they don't want next weeks story to be 'YouTube subsidizes karaterobot's hard-drinking combat LARP.'
It's not a balanced appraisal of facts and harms and injury allocation like in a tort lawsuit; more a seat-of-the-pants executive judgement call on 'does hanging out with this guy commercially make us look bad?' If the answer is yes, then you suddenly no longer have a commercial relationship. It's similar to the 'morals clauses' in the contracts of TV and movie stars, but with the difference that tech firms basically set contractual terms unilaterally and the network effects are so strong that that no individual performer has any kind of leverage to request anything different.
It's worth understanding that the incredible concentration of corporate power on digital platforms is due to a mix of technological moats, the first-mover advantage of preferential attachment, and a philosophical shift away from breaking up monopolies, on the theory that large entities often deliver greater consumer benefits than a competitive market place, a viewpoint famously summarized here: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
It's not a good thing.
This is beside the point, but I want to bring it up because I think it's important to remember we live in a bubble.
A majority of people on earth are not Youtube users. Only ~60% of the world's population uses the internet[1], and of those, I'd assume a significant portion lack the bandwidth to stream video. Also, Youtube is blocked in China.
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India has the most youtube users at 570M+, though the US is highest in youtube traffic. Japan also has high youtube traffic per capita.
https://www.globalmediainsight.com/blog/youtube-users-statis...
Obviously there's problems with this reasoning right? Why bother mentioning pointless rationalization here? You and Youtube both know there's only one video service that offers long form format and that's youtube themselves.
Just tell it like it is. Youtube having a monopoly over online video content is effectively gagging and censoring Brand because of the alleged crimes influencing their business. It is not technically eliminating freedom of speech but it is both practically and effectively doing the same thing.
This points to a an overall problem within the US today regarding freedom of speech. We effectively do not have freedom of speech because all public speaking platforms are controlled by business interests.
That's what's going on here. Not some "oh you're free to go to another video service" bullshit.
Until YouTube becomes boring and enough interesting people end up together somewhere else, and then all the users will leave at once (in internet time).
Doctorow huffs his own farts at a James Cameron level, but he's right about this.
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 alternative justice system, where public shaming and demonetization are the punishments.
I think building in redundancy to reduce single points of failure is generally a good thing.
Is it bad policy? Yes. Does it allow for flexibility in a world that is never black and white? Also yes. Honestly, if there was a better solution, what would it be? The questions are endless once you start down this rabbit hole.
When some content is banned from Youtube, it's got positives and negatives. Like when Alex Jones was banned, I was annoyed that I could no longer watch Alex Jones on Youtube if I ever wanted to, but more than that glad that he'd never appear in my autoplay or recommended videos. While I think there is some truth that YouTube can do as it likes, people talking about what their rules are, complaining about them, lobbying Youtube even, is all fair too. A fair complaint would be that the user does not get enough control over what gets recommended. If enough people are talking about that issue, it could motivate Youtube or a competitor to provide that kind of control, as it would be a signal that it would attract an audience to that platform and keep them engaged if recommendation control was a major concern of theirs.
Also, in some circumstances I could be quite annoyed with Youtube for not demonetising or banning some content. It could be something I don't want to watch personally, or more likely something I feel disgusted by such as Elsagate type scandals where the 'protect the children' type argument or instinct in my opinion or feelings override free speech concerns.
People criticising what Youtube does and talking about what a video hosting website would ideally do helps to create the conceptual foundations for the ideal video hosting website, and which Youtube and anyone else who reads the comments can use.
Also, discussing how such a system works produces what would be considered 'prior art' when it comes to patents.
YouTube, afaik, doesn’t just let advertisers blacklist individual channels.
I see this sentiment all the time and I just don't understand it. If I sold razor blades, or if I was Stephen He's dad and sold Beijing Corn, I would want EVERYONE buying my product. Communists, Fascists, Russians, Ukrainians, Israelis, Palestinians, Antifa, Proud Boys, Prince Andrew, Andrew Tate, etc.... They may all hate each other but they should all agree that I make the best damn razor blades / canned corn on planet Earth, and everyone should buy it.
This weird era of conspicuous consumption, "lifestyle" branding, and virtue-signaling faux-activism can't end soon enough.
It's sort of amazing that the biggest search company on earth can't filter/select ads like that.
There is never anything more than that with corporations.
How has it taken YouTube this long, anyway? Hasn’t much of this stuff been openly known for a decade or more? Is YouTube literally just reacting to the media cycle and nothing more?
this is going to make his conspiracy's seem true like they are targeting him
but it could be as simple as advertisers don't care about aerosmith because it's bigger than steven tyler, whereas brand is purely a youtube based opinion show and he is the main star of the show
It's not as if people who care about sexual assault are somehow lined up in Steven Tyler's corner. Quite the opposite.
You are witnessing the slow merging of Silicon Valley with the Security State. Buckle up. It gets super fun after this.
I am genuinely confused how so many smart people can be so short sighted.
It means they'll ban anyone who is high profile enough to expose YouTube to PR risk.
This really exposes Google's hypocrisy, though. If they were worried about protecting the community, surely they would remove his content and not his ability to monetize it.
They must mean that "community" is being harmed by the content and not by the ads (else the responsible thing would be to shut down altogether ...)
That said, I think Brand's videos are a big pile of barf, though again, if that were the standard, YouTube would have to throw out 90+% of their content...
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.
There are other examples if you dig. This Brand is a tool and can't stand him, but this all happens conveniently right when he gained a little bit of traction by being an outspoken critique of the government.
It's just a euphemism for people.
This is an interesting question; why hasn’t anyone verified that these women are YouTube users?
Since we have established that “ecosystem” is a word that means “app developers” and not a broad term that could be interpreted to mean the general environment in which YouTube does business with advertisers and users, this means that YouTube is acting in defense of its users.
Furthermore this announcement gets even more confusing as punching someone in a bar is not something that can faithfully or objectively be separated from (alleged) rape by any community standards or legal bodies, YouTube is in even further hot water here
No they really aren't.
This is why I think the term "community guidelines" for "censorship policy" is such abusive gaslighting. It's unilateral censorship, not community, and they are rules, not guidelines.
It's the same deceptive drive that renamed "searching your bag" to "security screening" at airports.
Twitter has lost something like 60% of its advertisers because it turns out Proctor and Gamble doesn’t want an ad for Dawn dish detergent next to someone called BasedFuhrer1488 posting about how the Holocaust didn’t happen.
If it wasn’t for that all these platforms would let anything legal go as long as it drove engagement.
YouTube, in their statement, is pretending they have an objective standard that is fairly applied to everyone. In reality, there is no uniform standard. They ban people when business interests dictate it.
So their policy reads as “we have an objective standard,” but reality is “we ban when we feel like it.”
YouTube could fix this contradiction by changing their policy to something like “we will ban creators for any reason, at our discretion.”
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 pre-punishing a Brit based on a news article is the beginning of another level of dystopia none of us wants.
In fairness there is a discussion that needs to be had about private businesses that have the de facto power to wreck people's lives if they decide to de-platform them. 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. In any event, it has nothing to do with the criminal law concept of "innocent until proven guilty".
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.
This 'dystopia' is called freedom of association and I can confidentially tell you that I personally support the rights of any business to choose who they enter contracts with and not to do business with a likely sex offender, so I think you ought to speak for yourself.
There is no basis on which to compel a private business to host everyone's content and I would in fact consider that to be quite dystopian.
I sure hope you're never on a jury!
That doesn't seem right to me. If they were to cease hosting his material, that would maych their corporate-speak blurb. This sounds to me like more money for YouTube.
If he is demonetized, then his videos won’t get ad placement, so Google won’t make the money in the first place, as it will contribute neither to advertising revenue nor to the marginal benefit from the Premium users derived compared to non-Premium users in avoiding ads.
Since Google pays creators less than it makes from their content, Google is giving up money (in a narrow analysis) by demonetizing Brand, not keeping additional money. (In a broader analysis, the rational for demonetizing is that monetizing toxic content hurts the brand and alienates advvertisers, so it is profitable to demonetize that content in the long run despite the immediate hit from any particular decision to do so.)
The exception is demonetization for certain copyright claims, which effectively isn’t “really” demonetization, its letting the copyright holder take the creators place for monetization.
If you’re just starting out and don’t qualify to become a “partner”, you can’t monetize your videos until you reach X amount of subscribers and Y amount of watch hours.
This doesn’t mean your videos won’t have ads on them. They most assuredly will have ads on them. It just means that YouTube doesn’t consider you good enough to share the revenue with you.
Load of BS of course.
Either content is good enough to place ads on, revenue of which is shared, or your content isn’t good enough to place ads on. Making profit over someone else’s content (however abhorrent the person might be) is just dirty imho.
Corporate Overlords don't have to engage on Rights - it's all in the Privilege realm.
So we changed the terms. I felt like the T&S team (trust and safety) sighed a huge sigh of relief because they were having to deal with advertisers and bereft families complaining.
Anyway, it became a very heavy hammer that was very rarely used except in extreme circumstances.
I imagine not every company uses it as sparingly but it’s a much needed clause to deplatform certain kinds of charismatic people who are harmful to humanity. I don’t know anything about this particular case, nor do I want to know even a TL;DR. I’m just here for the comments and your comment chain struck a nerve.
That said, mere unsupported allegations leading to serious material consequences is a dystopian quagmire and should be actionable in a legal sense without regard to the absurdly inequitable stipulations put forth in the T&C.
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.
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... actually is a hopeful insight to me.
More like yet another reflection of the extant overton window.
Pure trolling, kind of funny, 100% clips of public figures with no commentary. Demonetized.
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.
Unfortunately, there's a load minority who try to push this when this far from the truth.
Went to YouTube.coms Russel Brand page, clicked the shortest video, let it play.
After the video, ad played, then the next Russell Brand video.
Next video was longer and included marked ads throughout the video, clearly pausing the ad content and labeled with a pop-up.
Also, YouTube still has its pop up that say, "Video contains paid promotion," so they know he is profiting off the video and are still allowing it AND YouTube is profiting from ad between videos.
Overall, I'd say YES, they are still allowing ads, they probably just suspended payments for "In-video" YouTube 3rd parts ads, really only 1 of 4 ad types they are serving.
Both YouTube and Russel Brand continue to make money off ads on Russell Brands videos on YouTube.
1. https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxUtzzTeakkcWlZp531K_jZ6JGWUSKbU7...
Not such a great opportunity when you consider that the audience for this sort of content is poorly-educated, credulous, reactionary, and anathema to advertisers who can actually support the businesses behind the platforms.
This is the most surprising thing about Elon's lurch to the right: it has already cost him c.40% of Twitter's ad revenue because, huge surprise, nobody wants to be associated with conspiracy theorists even when they aren't rapists or racists.
One I’d be doubly happy to continue not paying for.
I'm of the opinion (and I know the law disagrees with me in the U.S.) that you should not be able to bring charges against someone for a non capital offense, where all the evidence is he-said/she-said. a decade after the event happend. Our memories just aren't good enough for that.
Since these accusations, several famous people who have worked with him have come out with stories consistent with this behavior. Could it all be untrue, and there's some kind of witch hunt on Brand? I guess, but if it truly was an open secret, it makes perfect sense that people would distance themselves from him now when it comes out to the public.
However, I do believe it's wrong to start sanctioning people for a crime they've not yet been found guilty of.
personally i'd be surprised if the guy wasn't a rapist, he spent a decade virtually admitting it and acting like one, but it's absolutely fucked that that all somebody (person, newspaper, content creator, whatever) needs to do to completely and permanently take away someone's livelihood is call them a rapist on the internet.
our society is irreparably broken at this point, there's no coming back from any of this.
It basically just means that the average subscriber is watching ~2 of his videos a month.
I think it's something we're all vulnerable too.
It's important to be aware of the incentives you're allowing yourself to operate under.
A little tangential maybe, but it reminds me of this book review I really liked: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/books/review/herman-wouk-...
More accurately, the algorithm gave Brand incentive to change his videos. "The algorithm" can't steer the video directly; it needs to influence the content creators. It's the conscious decision, following incentives, of these people to change their content. And while we can understand why they may have done it, that doesn't make them blameless.
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' as obvious evidence of some deep state conspiracy. You now have an army of cheerleaders, and an alternative renevue source, ready to wage war with.
He steered. We should not remove his agency for the content he wrote, said, recorded, and uploaded.
"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 him once the news did break.
I'm a YouTuber, and I want to be very clear on the above.
I know I would get way more views (and subscribers, and money) if I did more stupid clickbait stuff. But I don't want to, that doesn't make me happy. Also, professionals should not do that out of being professional.
A house painter would make more money if he did a rush job, and a TV reporter would get in the news more if he told blatant lies on live national TV. Just because a person can make more money short term doing something, it doesn't mean they should not take 100% of the blame for doing it.
I could very easily make videos of doing highly illegal stuff, which would likely get a zillion views. Am I then less responsible for doing it?
Brand was kicked off the BBC fifteen years ago, for his disgraceful on-air abuse of Andrew Sachs ("Manuel" from Fawlty) and his daughter. Since then, he's only become more extreme and objectionable.
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
While a single bad apple might not sink a brand, if it starts to become a pattern, it can ruin brand image over time.
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.
you cant claim the moral high ground while profiting off them
It's weird reading all of this as someone who was a teenager from the era who idolised Brand and other indie scene figures like Pete Doherty. I remember reading about Brand dating Peaches Geldoff in the paper but didn't realise how young she was and how old he was in comparison. I think I assumed he was in his 20s and assumed she was in late teens or twenties based on the fact the tabloid press showed them stumbling out of nightclubs together and no-one seemed to be batting an eyelid. Though looking back I, and many others, were sneaking in to nightclubs all the time underage with fake IDs. It still goes on to this day and parents just seem to accept it as normal part of growing up and even a celebrated and encouraged rite of passage but maybe we should be having a more serious conversation about it. I don't go out anymore, but in my 20s bouncers definitely seemed to be taking checking IDs a lot more serious than they did when I was 17 so at least that's a start.
It wasn't uncommon in the 00s for school girls to be dating older guys who were no longer at school, Arctic Monkeys even wrote a song about it (Bigger Boys And Stolen Sweethearts) but someone over 30 dating a 16 year old definitely would have been considered weird and the fact the mainstream media wasn't batting an eyelid at it is damning. Why the Brand stuff is headline news but I've not seen a single mainsteam media article calling for the legal age to have sex to be raised to 18 is ridiculous. Teenagers are going to fuck regardless, but no-one is going to prosecute a 17 year old and a 15 year old having a relationship, and the police are smart enough not to waste time on an 18 year old and a 17 year old having a relationship but at least you then have a mechanism to protect 16 year olds from getting groomed like this. It also made me sad to find out that another of my indie heroes, Noel Fielding, was also doing the same thing - dating a 16 year old Pixie Geldoff when he was 33.
I'm not justifying any of Brand's actions, he has to take responsibility for what he's done especially if there was no consent, but he's quite obviously a people pleaser and he wouldn't have done half the stuff he did if it wasn't for the mainstream media and the culture they created around him. People are trying to use old videos of him flirting with celebrities on talkshows to damn him and disregarding the fact that the entire audience is laughing and clearly signalling that the culture at large was OK with what he was doing.
Stuff like Google demonetising Brand's videos just make me believe even more that at least some element of this is a targeted MSM culture war attack to take him down, even if a justified one. The problem is that at some point it's also going to take down people who don't deserve it - in fact it's no doubt already happened. I've read several mainstream articles where Jordan Peterson's ideas are completely misrepresented and character assassinated in a way that is completely unjustified. I agree with some of the things he says and I also disagree with others but there seems to be absolute no nuance or tolerance in the mainstream media any more, it's all tribalism - either you're good or you're bad and if you even agree with part of what one of the "bad" people say then you must be one of the bad ones. I honestly can't even debate any of Jordan Peterson's ideas with some people I know, even the ideas I dislike, because mentioning his name is like saying Voldemort and he's "The One Who Should Not Be Named".
Mainstream media outlets clearly have agendas and will go after people who speak out against them and will use anything at their disposal to do it. It's completely ridiculous.
*Obviously I would prefer for this to actually be settled in a court of law with evidence rather than public opinion, but the text message exchange and the rape clinic visit do look quite damning which is why I'm currently inclined to believe that at least that allegation is looking more likely than not on the face of it, even if some of the others turn out to be false.
My opinion is, many of his followers will stick with him because he is a mesiah like figure to many and people will see this as some type of MSM, Establishment attack because he is revealing "the truth", top comment on YT:
Honestly, dude, it's surprising it has taken them this long to try and shut you down. For me, and many people who follow your content, it is just a sign that you are on the right track Stay strong, brother.
And the non mainstream ones will do this even harder
I wish I hadn't read that about Noel Fielding. I love The Mighty Boosh.
It's fundamentally "weird" for someone with 33 years of life experience to be able to connect, in a relationship-context, to a 16 year old. Having said that, celebrity-adjacent 16 year-olds (ie. Pixie Geldoff) probably have more life experience (for better or more likely worse) than your random 16 year-old. Still way up on the "weird" scale though.
But justice must still take it's course - even decades later - the truth will no doubt come out during the investigation.
What is maddening is his cult on YouTube who did not bother to watch the documentary and the testimony of the accusers before jumping all in to defend him.
I’m aware that he’s a popular populist and the slippery slope is obvious here, independent of the particulars of the specific case.
The playbook to silence a relatively loud political voice is now obvious from the YT response. It is a given that cynical actors on all sides will evolve to further exploit this strategy, especially so if accusers do not have to testify under oath.
YouTube, on a common sense basis, should have recognized that political reality today and tred more carefully — much more so than for a travel influencer, for example.
The long term game theory here, like brand boycotts, is hopefully that the exploitation of this strategy by all political players would lead to the strategy losing power due to general fatigue and whataboutisms.
If I started a platform for Bluegrass musicians to upload their music and someone started uploading videos of shooting guns I should be able to cut them off without any interference at all.
And they should be able to start their own website that lets folks upload videos of people shooting their guns.
YouTube is pretty liberal in the range of content they allow. They didn't boot Brand off the platform, the just quit paying him for using it. That doesn't bother me a bit.
If YouTube can demonetise a content creator at the discretion of YouTube (because they can), then surely it follows that an individual can de-monetise a content creator at their own discretion (because they can).
A platform demonetising someone is surely of much greater impact than an individual doing it. A platform owns their platform, from which the content is being delivered and so their discretion is justification enough. An individual owns the hardware and bandwidth upon and through which the content is being played, and so their discretion is justification enough.
Am I performing the mental gynastics of denial to make that leap?
Part of the differentiation I'm making in using the word "discretion" is that it's not illegal content that's being demonetised. Agree or disagree or find it as morally reprehensible as you feel the need to, the content itself (the very thing being demonetised) is not illegal. And, in fact, had been happily monetised for the past however long.
For everybody in here who is building a startup and is unsure about going tpe to toe with a tech giant. Do not be intimidated, these big organizations are afraid of everything .
Favorable press and 'feel good statements' like this become more important than making money.
This is true for companies buying ads too, the big automotive companies would absolutely make a fortune both in terms of money and advertisement by having their officially licensed cars in the Grand Theft Auto series, but they are afraid because oohhh the car would be shown with damage, protagonists can shoot at it and from it, they can drive like maniacs killing pedestrians...
I don't want to hear from him or about him. I don't want to hear from people that like him. I didn't want to hear Radio 4 talking about it this morning. I don't want to stop his free speech, I just want to avoid him
Yes: don't watch his videos and don't read or watch news coverage about him.
The hard core libertarians who say that Brands “free speech” is being reduced… well YT has freedom too and they should be free to deplatform.
We have freedom from government oppression but when you are on someone else’s property, you should have no/low rights.
Additionally there is often large financial incentive for accusers (and their lawyers) via lawsuits and it serves as a fantastic method of hurting people politically even if they are exonerated.
The class is anyone who has been demonetized, and yet youtube/google is still profiting off of them, when no due process has been applied.
Google doesn't get to be judge, jury, and executioner.
So it's only a problem if you allegedly assault people?
Even the "testimony" they released was recorded by an actor. There's simply very little of substance here.
> Anonymous allegations
The identity of the alleged victims is not public, but that is not the same thing as an anonymous allegation. The newspaper and television channel know the identities of the individuals, as does Brand.
> from more than a decade ago
Utterly irrelevant.
> procured by a fishing reporter
It's unclear what you mean by this. 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. 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.
> should not lead to the cancellation of someone's means of supporting themselves
Suspension without pay is extremely common whilst investigations of serious misconduct in or outside of the workplace are carried out, but even if that weren't the case: YouTube is not Brand's employer, he chooses to publish on their platform [presumably] knowing the terms of service, and is not beholden to YouTube as his only source of income. After he was "censored" by YouTube during COVID for espousing inane conspiratorial drivel, he began posting on a service called "Rumble", not to mention the royalties and residuals he still receives from his previous work and of course not forgetting his option to use one of his myriad other platforms (or indeed YouTube's, if it's within the ToS) to encourage his brainless fans to remunerate him directly or via other means.
> This is absurd
Even your straw man retelling of this situation is fairly benign-seeming.
> this is tyrannical
Lol.
> Even the "testimony" they released was recorded by an actor.
You could be forgiven for not knowing this if you get all of your news from Elon and Russell Brand, but it is absolutely the de facto standard in journalism to protect the identity of individuals with a mixture of actors and altered voices. If you watch the Channel 4 documentary you will note that at times they use the real people, with altered voices, and at times they use actors.
None of this undermines the credibility of the reporting or the accusations, and -- again -- the identities of the individuals in the reporting are known to both the journalists and Brand, and the police know the identity of the _further_ individual who came forward in light of the allegations to make _another_ accusation.
Edit: for example, someone like Chris Brown is convicted of domestic abuse as well as accused of many other incidents. He appears to be monetised on youtube.
>If a creator's off-platform behaviour harms our users, employees or ecosystem, we take action.
So why does this apply to Russell Brand but not to Chris Brown who is convicted of violence against another YouTube user? It must mean that youtuber endorses the behaviour and criminal activity of Chris Brown.
But it certainly raises the question of YT being arbitrarily punitive. Rather than endorsing, it ignores certain allegations while demonetizing others.
If his content was on the other side of the aisle he’d be defended not demonetized.
If there were weeks of Chris Brown articles, tech companies would certainly distance themselves
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 little to no major influence, is suddenly getting completely cancelled across an entire swath of avenues and platforms, based solely on accusations.
This is not true. The independent corroborating evidence is also material. Contemporaneous records from a rape clinic is powerful evidence.
More generally, innocent until proven guilty is a legal concept, not a social one. From a social perspective, that's never been the standard, nor should it be. Bad folks have often been shunned without convictions - that's why the norm has been "resign in disgrace," not "get thrown in prison"
I'm not a court. Are you a court?
I hope you're not a court. Sentient buildings weird me out.
If four employees came to me and accused someone of harassing them, I would weigh the evidence and if warranted, fire the employee. No court involved.
When you are self-righteous prick as prickly as brand, it is extremely easy to believe the accusers.
"Until" always makes it sound to me like it is a foregone conclusion.
There are no laws requiring the public to treat an accused person as if they never committed a crime until said crime has been proven. It is up to the public whether they believe the victim or the accused. In this case youtube has decided to believe the victim. Perhaps youtube—like so many others—have deemed the accusations credible, and they are in their full right to act on these believes.
YouTube isn't a court of law, fortunately.
If he's innocent, he can sue them.
Yes. But to be fair it wouldn't be out of character for Russel, if you actually know who he is, so maybe that's why the internet finds it so easy to ignore silly things like "evidence" and "proof".
All Youtube did was cite their “Creator responsibility“ clause[1] as the reason. This could have included a myriad of violations, especially considering the type of content he was producing.
Also, if you read the allegations, he very much was in the protected status you mention. “Open secret”, lots of people covering for him, running interference, etc etc. Calling him a “D-list celeb, likely with little to no major influence” illustrates your lack of research into the issue.
[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7650329?hl=en as the reason.
For high-profile figures like Brand, while the financial impact may be substantial, they often have other resources at their disposal. However, for smaller creators, who might be living on the edge, this could be devastating. We need to remember that behind every headline are real people with real lives. Ensuring fairness and empathy in our responses, especially when the stakes are this high, is crucial.
Once again, another coincidence in which side of the political aisle gets censored.
https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/when-men-claim-to-be-femini...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/schneiderman-abus...
Youtube is not and never was a "public service". It's their platform and they are free to do with it as they want, with very little exception. It's not any different than a mom and pop store having a "No shirt, No shoes, No service" sign and enforcing that. It's their store, it's private property, it's their rules.
YouTube is enforcing its ToS, which Brand freely agreed to when he chose to begin using their platform to post his conspiracy theories.
> And it pads the pockets of shareholders
YouTube runs adverts on videos which are not part of the partnership program, but it is unclear (as far as I can see from this thread) whether they run adverts on de-monetised videos. Do you have a source either way?
In any case, YouTube did $29.9 billion of revenue in FY2022. The Guardian estimated that Brand's YouTube videos, of which there are five per week, likely gross him (pre-tax) in the order of $5,000. That's around $1.3m a year.
So yes, if YouTube is still running ads against Brand's YouTube videos then "the shareholders" are benefitting from an additional $1.3m per year which would otherwise have been paid out to Brand, but now that you know the aggregate benefit to YouTube constitutes 0.000044% of the service's annual revenue, I'm curious as to whether you think this had any bearing whatsoever on the decision to demonetise him, in line with their Terms of Service?
I suppose not
The culture wars are out of control
Tomorrow everyone will be back at 'right to work' and 'freedom of association' around here on some other topic.
A more accurate statement is that advertising companies hate some people and factions.
Russel Brand hasn't even been to COURT yet....
And while there’s a valid counter-argument in some of the numbers creators on X have put up (e.g., Tucker Carlson), those are really the exceptional cases.
I could see Brand going straight over to X, but I don’t know if that’s sufficient to really argue that YouTube isn’t effectively a monopoly in the space.
YouTube will still share his videos, but keep the ad revenue.
Thanks so much for protecting us, YouTube.
I guess I'd rather it this way because I hate it when videos are removed, but it just seems inconsistent.