Milkshakes and demonitization
Meanwhile Carl Benjamin is on the outs with YouTube.
YouTube has demonetised Carl Benjamin’s Sargon of Akkad video channel after the political commentator turned UKIP candidate made comments about raping a woman MP.
Earlier this week, West Midlands police announced an investigation into Benjamin’s remarks made in a YouTube video about Labour MP Jess Phillips, where the UKIP European election candidate questioned whether he’d rape her before concluding “nobody’s got that much beer”.
I was just objecting to Twitter’s permanent banning of a woman who told a boy he is not a lesbian. Should I also, to be consistent, object to YouTube’s demonitization (you should forgive the word) of Carl Benjamin’s YouTube?
There are two (or more) ways of looking at it. One is that no one should mess with anyone’s access to media outlets ever for any reason. Another is that no one should mess with anyone’s access to media outlets ever for stupid footling childish reasons. My way of looking at it is, clearly, the second. I don’t think Twitter should kick back and look dreamily at the sky while men use its outlet to hurl shit at women in their thousands and tens of thousands, and I also don’t think Twitter should banish a woman for telling a boy he’s not a lesbian. I realize it’s a terribly subtle and nuanced view, but there it is.
When contacted for comment on Friday, Benjamin sent BuzzFeed News an unrelated political statement about knife crime. Several of his online followers have been tweeting a statement claiming to be from Benjamin.
“YouTube let us know today that they have demonetised my YouTube channel, which as you know is my primary source of income, and how I support my family and team,” the statement reads.
It’s very profitable, talking trash about women on YouTube.
Who knew…that this little gold mine was there…? Reassuring, as one never kows what the future holds.
;-)
PS: What a dropkick.
There are definitely problems with big tech, but they are mostly related to the ‘big’ part, rather than the ‘tech’ part. But instead of dealing with that, we continue to throw tech solutions at the problem even though we know they don’t work and can’t work, even in principle.
For example, one of the obvious problems with tweets or YouTube videos or whatever is that there are too many of them to have humans reviewing their content. Just too much material and too much training and monitoring of the reviewers to ever possibly do a decent job. Or even a terrible job, it just doesn’t scale. So companies use algorithms and machine learning instead. But these are always going to be both biassed and easily-fooled, so the companies have to use policies that err on the side of banning (in the case of videos where there’s a claim of copyright infringement) and leaving up (where it looks like it will be profitable, regardless of how awful the content is).
This reaches new levels of problematic because these platforms are now so big that a banning from them is close to a banning from meaningful public discourse.
The solution is not to expect that some future technology will solve this problem because it won’t. The solution is to break up these platforms and not let any get so big again. Then companies could have actually ethical standards, banning or censoring is a matter of enforcing those standards and can be justified by them, banned people can go elsewhere and everyone else gets to choose which platform they want to use based on those standards and how well the platform lives up to them.
Note that I said “could”, not “will”. I know this utopian scenario wouldn’t take place so blithely. But there would be a basis for proper competition and a much lower entry barrier for new players with crazy ideas like not allowing harassers to harass people or not automatically siding against women every single time.
Note also that I’m not excusing the current big platforms for their terrible and inconsistent behaviour. They use algorithms as an excuse to do whatever makes them the most money.
But anyway, although it galls me a little to say it, legislation is definitely needed to get these platforms into line. It galls me because most of the legislature for such things around the world has been very, very bad. What’s happening with copyright in the EU is a particularly good example and so is the constant demand of governments to ban encryption. We do need legislature, though. And it should start with breaking the monopolies and making sure new ones can’t emerge. Admittedly, I don’t know exactly how any of that would be possible.