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.
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.
Then why does Google control my phone? Can't have it both ways
Because you chose to buy that phone. Plenty of phones without their software.
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 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.
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.
Same for an electronic money account.
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.
I can’t fly to another planet and terraform it. I can (and do) host my own video streams however.
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.
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.
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.
And any abuse should be prosecuted by the government.
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.
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.
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.
The Rohingya for one
Lets be clear here - we're not talking about difference in opinion of fiscal policy that we can debate the pros and cons of.
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.
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.
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.
Where is my error in understanding?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Agree completely.
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.
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.
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... actually is a hopeful insight to me.
I wrote a thing a few years ago after reading one of the case studies in John Doerr’s OKR book that used YT as an example, I think the point I was trying to make likely still stands https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/writing/okr-youtube-uninte...
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.
Yet, the dystopic future you describe is not 100% there yet.
More like yet another reflection of the extant overton window.
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
(see: wikileaks)
Pure trolling, kind of funny, 100% clips of public figures with no commentary. Demonetized.
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?
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?
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.
>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.
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.
Like Wikipedia? Or like public Square? Or like a government inquest?
All are different. All are also influenced by capital
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.
Let's say I wanted to search for pictures of Ellen Page, which do you think gives more accurate results for the query?
Unfortunately, there's a load minority who try to push this when this far from the truth.