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Comment by cs02rm0 | Hacker News Reader

Dame Caroline Dinenage, UK Minister of State for Digital and Culture has petitioned social media companies including Rumble, TikTok, Facebook, X, the BBC and Channel 4 to suspend Russell Brand from the platforms after a Channel 4 programme made accusations of sexual assault against him.

He denies these accusations and they have not been tested in a court of law. Rumble have declined.

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The sexual assault allegations have not been put to law because every victim realizes that (a) it's a deeply miserable experience having to describe what happened to you over and over again, (b) a load of people will call you a slut on social media, (c) it may impair your chances of ever getting work again, and (d) if people don't believe you you may get countersued.

Courts and police are terrible at dealing with this stuff. That's the lesson of Weinstein, Savile, Rotherham, etc.

See e.g. David Carrick, Met police officer, who after 17 years was finally prosecuted and admitted guilty to 85 offences, after the Met had a brief outbreak of taking this stuff seriously after Wayne Couzens, another police officer was jailed for the murder of Sarah Everard.

Are you then suggesting that allegations suffice? That there is no need for "innocent until proven guilty" in the face of such allegations?

I think the point is that this is a particularly fraught area of discussion, and that the "best" approach may not be the one which is legally enshrined, because the legally enshrined approach is severely flawed in its ability to actually address sexual assault.

Whether that means we should treat allegations as proof is a related but -- I think -- separate question.

Some kind of extralegal response then?

That standard is required for criminal sanctions, but it is not required for private parties to change who they freely associate with, who are free to take a more balance-of-probabilities approach.

I'm free to say that he's probably a rapist, because I'm not a court of law and I have free speech.

(The irony is that Brand spends all the time on his youtube channel making unsubstantiated and probably false allegations about all sorts of public figures such as Bill Gates)

I'm free to say that he's probably a rapist, because I'm not a court of law and I have free speech.

I really hope that you're not in the UK, if you are you've just exposed yourself to a libel suit which could cost you your house, and that obnoxious turd has enough money already.

Yes, let the mob decide. Frontier justice is clearly the way to go because the current system has flaws.

> Courts and police are terrible at dealing with this stuff.

Perhaps, but not as terrible as self-appointed "activist" lynch mobs.

It's a mark of where we are that "lynch mobs are a bad idea" has become open to debate.

And not a good one.

Thanks for demonstrating my point.

The letter Rumble posted isn't asking them to suspend him from their platform, as far as I can see.

Not directly

And Harvey Weinstein claimed the same thing - innocent !!!! - come on - with so many accusers unrelated to each other - it is kind of obvious to any person that he crossed the line with woman he slept with.

Whether it broke the law is a question that needs to be dealt with by a court.

A lot of people are going to end facepalming themselves when the truth comes out.

"DAMN! I didn't trip over myself fast enough to make sure this personality was immediately demonetised on every internet social media platform after they were accused of a crime on a TV channel!"

said nobody, ever.

The plausibility factor is rather high (Occam's Razor) - he has millions in the bank and his little believing cult - he will survive this if he is innocent.

Odd he did not sue for libel yet.

It's not clear whether you're missing the point on purpose or not, so I'll just come right out and say it; his guilt for any crimes of which he is accused is entirely unrelated to how sensible the proposition is that entities ought to be able to completely shut down people on every social media platform by accusing them of something and then immediately demanding that they be demonetized by these platforms.

> Whether it broke the law is a question that needs to be dealt with by a court.

Absolutely.

> it is kind of obvious to any person that he crossed the line

What line are you talking about, if not the law?

Even if Brand is convicted of something and sent to prison, a parliament member should never write such a request.

I thought recidivism was a concern?

These accusations are 20 years old, why wasn't any of this brought up when Brand was a liberal darling? Why is it only as he gains popularity and opposes the war in the Ukraine do media organizations, governments and tech companies decide in lockstep to act this way?

Roger Ailles etc ...

It was different times back then - woman complaining about sexual harassment or unwanted advances in the workplace was discounted and not taken seriously.

Remember how Trump was defended - oh take it easy woke woman - it was just locker room talk.

It's taken a long time to assemble a libel-proof case, and several people have reportedly already been sent libel threats. Brand has already won a libel case back in 2014 about allegations that he cheated on his girlfriend. Perhaps that needs revisiting.

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