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The Monetization Window is the new Overton Window. I think people underestimate how much Youtube's monetization policy influences what popular creators put in v

• woooooo 3y ago
  Matt Taibbi brought up a case of a guy who put up montages of Trump saying the 2020 election was rigged cut up with clips of liberal media figures saying the Russians stole 2016. Pure trolling, kind of funny, 100% clips of public figures with no commentary. Demonetized.
  • kouru225 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • anankaie 3y ago
      Satire and commentary is covered under Fair Use.
      • kouru225 3y ago
        >100% clips of public figures with no commentary. Demonetized. Doesn’t sound like satire or commentary to me
        • Izkata 3y ago
          The comparison to the Trump clips they cut with is the commentary.
        • woooooo 3y ago
          Clips of public figures saying things are fair use, period. How do you think any news media functions?
          • kouru225 3y ago
            No. As someone who works in documentaries, you absolutely have to license footage of public figures, including news footage. There’s a reason most news media shoot their own footage. If you are commentating on it and making significant changes, then it can be fair use.
            • beauzero 3y ago
              Is that why reaction videos get away with playing a whole clip? I have always wondered about that.
          • SR2Z 3y ago
            The public figure can't copyright their appearance, but whoever recorded the clip absolutely has a copyright on it. The funniest thing about copyright issues is that whenever they come up, people are so confidently wrong about the actual law. Lots of stuff on YouTube is only permitted because the rightsholders allow it to stay up - every cover of every modern song, for example.
            • kube-system 3y ago
              > Lots of stuff on YouTube is only permitted because the rightsholders allow it to stay up - every cover of every modern song, for example. And many of those rights-holders only allow it because YouTube built a mechanism that helps them detect these uses and then automatically siphon off ad revenue it generates.
          • lesuorac 3y ago
            > How do you think any news media functions? Why do you think all of the media responses to viral things on twitter are "Hey, I'm X from Y News Corp; can we use your footage"? If it was fair use they wouldn't bother to ask.
        • tiahura 3y ago
          It's almost certainly fair use. The Copyright Act explicitly allows the use of copyrighted material for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, and the like. Courts have historically been sensitive to First Amendment concerns when copyrighted materials are used for transformative purposes. In Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569 (1994), the U.S. Supreme Court emphasized the transformative nature of parody as a form of commentary, giving it a wide berth under fair use. Now, onto the crux of your argument about implicit commentary. Even if a work does not contain explicit commentary, the juxtaposition of clips alone can function as a form of critique or commentary. This is especially relevant when highlighting inconsistencies or ironies in public discourse. While there isn't direct commentary, the act of selectively piecing together these clips communicates a larger point or message. Courts often look at the 'purpose and character' of the use, and if it is transformative—adding new meaning or context—it's generally favored under fair use.
          • carlosjobim 3y ago
            Thank you for explaining this. It is obvious if you think about it, but some commenters seem to think copyright can be used as some kind of loophole to shield public figures from exposure of their public behaviour.
          • kouru225 3y ago
            You can do that if you want to risk a legal battle, but Youtube doesn't care about your legal battle until its over. The fact of the matter is that footage can be copyrighted and videographers have the right to protect their copyright. If I go film Trump giving a speech with the sole purpose of selling that material to news agencies and you decide to release that footage on your own platform, then you're at risk of infringing on that copyright. The only way to completely decide if you're infringing on their copyright is through a court case. Currently, outside of unique cases like "response videos," it's common for Youtube to side with the copyright owner. So I'm betting Youtube demonetized it for infringing on copyright.
            • tiahura 3y ago
              I agree that YouTube will often side with the copyright holder - I’m a Rick Beato fan, and there’s a practical risk of demonetization or removal on that platform. However, it’s crucial to differentiate between what YouTube decides to do and what the actual law permits under fair use. YouTube’s policies don’t necessarily reflect a balanced interpretation of copyright law. When it comes to copyright law itself, montage videos of politicians that serve a transformative purpose, such as critique or commentary, fit squarely within the realm of fair use, as established by various court precedents. So, while you may face a challenge on platforms like YouTube, the underlying legality of such videos is more accommodating than those platforms might suggest.
    • woooooo 3y ago
      Name of the youtuber is Matt Orfalea, you can Google him or watch his videos.
    • jtbayly 3y ago
      The Twitter Files were precisely what Taibbi said. The USG telling social media companies which people should have their speech censored.
      • splitstud 3y ago
        [dead]
      • lesuorac 3y ago
        Uh, I guess one could phrase it that way but it's rather dishonest. It'd be akin to saying a police officer testifying that they saw X person shoot Y person as attempting to deplatform X person. -- Honestly the only thing questionable in the twitter files was the USG telling twiter which accounts were their cy-ops accounts so they wouldn't get banned. Twitter having a policy of you can't do Y on the platform and the USG asking Twitter if X person is violating Y is not illegal censorship.
        • prometheus76 3y ago
          Is government censorship via a third party not a problem for you?
          • costigan 3y ago
            Was it Twitter's policy or not? (Of course it was, as we see by how easily it was changed by the new owner.)
          • ToDougie 3y ago
            It clearly isn't. Wait until the tables turn on them, though :)
            • lesuorac 3y ago
              You understand that USG in reference to the twitter files means Donald Trump as he happened to be in charge of the executive branch during that period?
    • adamsb6 3y ago
      IIRC it was for election disinformation, not copyright.
    • nvm0n2 3y ago
      The reason YouTube gave is that it was recruiting for violent criminal organizations. No joke. https://www.racket.news/p/youtube-hits-orf-again-as-censorship https://www.racket.news/p/youtube-hits-orf-again-as-censorsh...
    • gottorf 3y ago
      > The Twitter files were an absolute joke. Are you serious? A US District Court as well as the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found that those files were not in fact a joke, and that the federal executive did strong-arm private entities like Twitter to censor.
      • amanaplanacanal 3y ago
        I suspect is going to be overturned at the Supreme Court.
  • diogenes4 3y ago
    I'm honestly confused what people get upset about using a private platform. If you want better accountability argue for an open platform uncontrolled by capital. What is the point of complaining while suggesting nothing? This conversation is even more useless than the old "marketplace of ideas" bullshit.
    • SkyMarshal 3y ago
      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?
      • throwaway5959 3y ago
        Now do Twitter.
      • fallingknife 3y ago
        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.
        • SkyMarshal 3y ago
          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.
        • 3y ago
  • agentgumshoe 3y ago
    I think the point you're making is there's no such thing as the Far Left, despite the Far Right seeing such common use.
    • mcpackieh 3y ago
      Those terms, particularly with the 'far' intensifier, are all relative.
      • agentgumshoe 3y ago
        And subjective too, which is convenient.
• diogenes4 3y ago
  > The Monetization Window is the new Overton Window. More like yet another reflection of the extant overton window.
  • savingsPossible 3y ago
    to a degree. 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)
• freitzkriesler2 3y ago
  It's really what advertisers are willing to put up with. Unfortunately most companies are run by cowards and I know for a fact that having your ad presented alongside something controversial doesn't imply the brand supports it Unfortunately, there's a load minority who try to push this when this far from the truth.
• mrtksn 3y ago
  I wonder if YouTube takes into consideration local values when doing this. For example, nudity and other controversial stuff can have much different standards on what's acceptable and what's not. If this is not baked into the formula, then it's likely that YouTube is pushing cultures to align with SV or some managers in Google. 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.
  • lotsofpulp 3y ago
    > 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.
    • ClumsyPilot 3y ago
      > You do not get to control Google’s computers. Then why does Google control my phone? Can't have it both ways
• curiousllama 3y ago
  This is a very interesting point. Tech-media companies (Google, Meta, Tik Tok) increasingly serve a similar gatekeeper function for public discourse that TV networks (ABC, NBC, CBS) did 50 years ago. This... actually is a hopeful insight to me.
  • iamacyborg 3y ago
    The difference is that YT and similar tech platforms have access to much more data which allows them to optimise (or not) for these outcomes. 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-unintended-consequences/ https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/writing/okr-youtube-uninte...
  • tatrajim 3y ago
    You would really enjoy the Chinese internet world, where legions of "gatekeepers" at Bytedance et al. bravely patrol the cyber world and rapidly eliminate any undesirable utterance. It's very clean and reassuring.
  • arp242 3y ago
    I think the main difference is that traditionally, this gatekeeper function was "decentralized". That is, ABC, NBC, CBS, New York Times, The Atlantic, Baltimore Sun, etc. etc. etc. all made their own editorial decisions, and there were dozens – if not hundreds – of decisions being made, rather than just a small handful of them. 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.
    • philistine 3y ago
      Isn't it a bit ridiculous that a guy like that *has to* make his money through YouTube? Make a podcast! Tour! I'm not going to go. I'm trying to spend my money on people who bring value to the world. Yet, the dystopic future you describe is not 100% there yet.
• mhh__ 3y ago
  It interesting seeing Mr Beast talk about AB testing thumbnails — his old style was apparently not actually what the algorithm wanted but he'd never tested it properly.
  • the_doctah 3y ago
    There was another style other than him looking stupefied with his mouth open? I'd be fine if that face disappeared off Youtube entirely because everyone seems to have copied that.
• Aunche 3y ago
  This is how ad-subsidized media has always worked. You worked for a television network has a team of censors that protected it from reputational damage. You had to listen to them if you wanted your show to air.
  • pixl97 3y ago
    Heh, I bet there is an age gap here in the replies. Older people remember the days of TV/magazines where if you did the wrong thing, suddenly your face disappeared from the media like it never existed. Then the wild west days of the internet was a weird time where there was all kinds of crazy crap on the net. Now we've recentralized the services and it looks like traditional media. 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.
  • harshreality 3y ago
    Curated vs non-curated content. Apples and oranges. 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?
  • pandaxtc 3y ago
    This is something I think is overlooked very often. I feel like a constant narrative I hear is that censoring media like this is a new-fangled concept when in reality this has been standard practice forever.
• PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  vernacular such as "unalived" is specifically to get around youtube's content policing.
  • tenpies 3y ago
    See also "cerveza sickness" for when any discussion about COVID would get you flagged, and any narrative except the latest globalist one was tolerated.
• paulpauper 3y ago
  This is why contract law exists. You can cancel me, sure, go ahead, but you will pay up. With youtube, the contract is written, in the TOS, to 100% favor youtube.
• calibas 3y ago
  It's not just video content either, Google's been fucking up the whole Internet for a while now. 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.
• the_doctah 3y ago
  I use Yandex. Google results are actively and overly censored and manipulated.
  • palmer_fox 3y ago
    Ah, finally a trustworthy unmanipulated search engine coming from an honest uncensored country.
    • the_doctah 3y ago
      Hey, at least it ain't Google. Let's say I wanted to search for pictures of Ellen Page, which do you think gives more accurate results for the query?
      • palmer_fox 3y ago
        That's an interesting case. I honestly don't know what is more accurate here: to show more recent photos after the transition or ignore that and mostly show the older photos that reflect the name (but not the person) more accurately.
      • shitlord 3y ago
        I just tried this. Most of the pictures on a google image search for "ellen page" are actually Ellen and not Elliot.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• hinkley 3y ago
  YouTube is a poor man’s gold rush. 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.