I'm surprised the youtube video is still up, and has 1.7 million or more views. With that many views he's probably earned up to 5 figures of revenue from the ads and such alone. IMHO he kind of has gotten away with it--he's making money and added a ton of subscribers. Youtube should really kick him off the platform.
This guy crashed a plane for profit. The fact that US law doesn't seem to have any meaningful sanction for him is not a reason for it to stay up.
They should delete the video. And I really don't understand the argument that they shouldn't stop him using their platform; my goodness if Youtube was mine he'd be gone and I wouldn't for a second wonder if there was any meaningful free speech implication for removing it.
He is dangerous, and the allure of more views on youtube made him do a dangerous thing. I'd be like: "OK, you're not my customer anymore".
So did the Discovery channel. The only difference is that they had asked the FAA permission to do so.
This guy crashed a plane for profit without permission. This may have just been stupidity, not understanding the consequences. Loads of people also crash other vehicles for fun and profit, so why should YT distinguish between someone crashing a car vs a plane. Where should YT draw the line? They don't make the laws.
The discovery channel didn’t try to pretend it was an engine fire. They set out to plan a plane crash with the full involvement of relevant authorities.
Yes, but now the FAA has stated what we all knew already — it was dangerous stunt undertaken entirely for self-promotion. YouTube don’t have to be experts?
It may be a huge difference, but the problem with asking Youtube to take that kind of decision without a court order is that you're expecting them to have expertise in aviation law. What next? Should they remove house flipping videos because of realtor regulations in various jurisdictions? Remove DIY videos because some jurisdictions require electrical repairs to be performed by certified technicians? The list is endless, and the precedent is so very bad.
> It may be a huge difference, but the problem with asking Youtube to take that kind of decision without a court order is that you're expecting them to have expertise in aviation law.
This is a bit of a silly way to look at it, I'm sorry to say.
What if they just remove the video on the balance of probability that it involved, in the FAA's judgement, a deliberate dangerous plane crash without permission?
This is not a challenging precedent. House-flipping is not smashing a plane into the ground without planning and without regard for safety, is it?
What about infringement on the regulation on the handling of unsafe chemicals?
Regulations on performing archælogical excavations?
Food safety violations?
Alcohol production?
Blasphemy laws in any country Youtube might be accessed from?
Animal cruelty laws? (Are hamster wheels cruel?)
Religious laws on the consumption of cattle / pork?
Privacy laws in Germany? (Dashcams are heavily regulated there)
Is it legal to show a Nazi swastika everywhere? A non Nazi swastika? A communist symbol? What about an imperial Japanese ensign?
Is it legal to say the Armenian suffered a genocide, or to claim they didn't?
Is it legal to cast doubt on any one finding of the Nuremberg trials?
What about mentioning a crime committed by a living person more than 20 years go? (Hint: it may not be legal in some European countries. Which ones? You tell me.)
Do you think youtube should systematically go through all videos for perceived dangerous people or people who look like views might "make" them do dangerous things, or just the ones that are brought to their attention by angry mobs / report volume?
And would "dangerous" include technically legal but dangerous actions like speaking up for gay rights in Yemen or criticizing cartels in Mexico? Or would they be more limited to the youtube wrong-think-corrections officer judging the video to demonstrate outright illegal actions like protesting Putin's special operation while in Russia, or publishing documents containing evidence of western war crimes?
I would normally agree with you but I feel like there’s a moral issue with what is essentially monetizing criminal activity. At a minimum, it should be demonetized and YouTube shouldn’t show any ads either.
I guess "criminal activity" may have been the wrong phrase. "Illegal activity" is more what I meant. Because not all illegal activity is adjudicated by a court, and a regulatory action by the FAA is one of those things.
Many jurisdictions have ways to seize profits of crime, and just about all have ways to punish crime including paying fines and restitution.
Don't you think it would be better to go through a system which has (at least a semblance of) due process, fairness, and transparency about the rules? Yes yes I know I know, "they're a private company they can do what they want". I'm not wondering what they can do, more flabbergasted about the apparent sudden and large support for corporations acting to censor and punish people like this.
> This is a dangerous thought. There is already too much decision making of what is allowed on our social platform by the big corps
In this case though the FAA has made the decision, he didn't do something in bad taste - he did something that could have been very dangerous to others, could have started a major fire, and was illegal (or at least broke the FAA rules enough for him to loose his license). And the reason he did that was (almost certainly) to make a YouTube video - I think YouTube would be justified from kicking him off their platform for this.
No, but in this case it's probably certain that if he wasn't going to make a YouTube video he wouldn't have done the illegal act. It's probably something that most companies and advertisers, wouldn't want to be associated with incase they were seen to be endorsing and encouraging the act.
> YouTube should at best demonetize the video, and only if it does that consistently based on a public policy.
Exactly.
I'm generally in favour of youtube removing objectionable material, or at least corralling it somewhere as they already do with their half-assed "mature content" filter, but it absolutely must be done on a policy basis which is written down upfront and made clear to uploaders, and subject to fair reviews. Doing it on outrage based case by case basis is just enraging to all involved.
And it's not the actual content of this video which is objectionable, but the circumstances under which it was made. Possibly it contravenes UK rules on profiting from crime if it's monetized: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN02...
- but (a) it's not in our jurisdiction and (b) he hasn't actually been convicted yet.
demonitization seems the best option I guess. Leave it up as a display of stupidity, and aviation history. But don't let him profit of something illegal
People write books about their past illegal exploits. Are you against people documenting their lives for profit, in-general? I don’t see the difference here except that it’s a video instead of a book.
I think the tricky part with this particular video is that the documentation (plane crash video) was the entire point of committing the act. If people were committing crimes entirely to sell tell all books or documentaries about doing it that would be a lot more sketchy.
> Youtube should really kick him off the platform.
No, a responsible behaviour is for Youtobe to purposely leave him on the platform for everybody to see what he did and the comments below the video, but cut his revenue for this video due to ToS violations. I sure the lawyers who wrote the ToS thought about something like this.
So if you are behaving obnoxiously in a private coffe shop the owners can’t ask you to leave?
Everyone is free to choose who they do business with. There are some protected categories but “people wantonly destroying airplanes for publicity and profit” is not one of them.
It can end with whatever criteria you want. I think clearly a viral video with this behavior fits the definition of something that should be taken down. It’s a guy deliberately crashing a plane for views. It’s the same thing as not publishing a mass shooter’s name. I’m sure they’re written in books somewhere, but not everything is a slippery slope to PRC censorship. It’s the process of finding the blurry line.
There have been a number of best sellers about people breaking the law in real life. No one was harmed in this case or the other case. I can't imagine someone wanting to censor this, just seems quite a bit extreme.
Businesses that hold a massive and unfair effective monopoly on communication and information are different from unremarkable coffee shops. And, furthermore, this is not an action that the business is going to take out of their own freewill, it's an action that you want to force on them by some mechanism of public rage, so it's not actually YouTube choosing who they do business with, it's YOU choosing for YouTube who they do business with, but masking it as YouTube's own decisions.
I don't get the obsession with removing dumb online stunts. I can understand calls for censoring violent crimes and even then you don't get to make this decision for other people, censoring unpleasant things doesn't make them go away.
But with dumb online posts the case just completely falls apart. "But he's going to benefit from this" ok so fucking what ? there's a whole class of people who do dumb, dangerous and harmful things for public approval and profit from it, they are called polliticans and celebrities. They routinely do unimaginabley stupid and outrageous things and profit from the publicity that comes with it. How is this any different, except that "online influencer" is a relatively new class of people unlike the other ones?
>There are some protected categories
Appealing to protected groups is the weakest argument you could ever make for "Businesses can censor whoever they like". Protected groups are arbitary and reflects lobbying and political considerations more than any moral truth. Why are some religious groups protected for instance? it's just a bunch of beliefs, they could be as wrong or as dumb as any other set of beliefs right ? they are not immutable characteristics of the people believing them. (not anymore than any other kind of beliefs)
My own personal opinion is that it's stupid to classify people as "Protected" or not, but rather any business that have reasonably-easy-to-find alternatives can do whatever the hell they like, refuse to serve customers based on skin color, gender, favorite programming language, you name it. As long as it's "easy" to find alternatives (by some objective standard the law defines, like "there's is a similar service within a 1-KM radius"), they can do whatever they like.
But for all other businesses who aren't so easy to replace, common sense morality says they should be EXTREMELY curtailed from censoring or denying *anyone* without a very good reason.
Alas, we don't live in my utopia and the laws of this time and place are extremely dumb and discriminating.
> Businesses that hold a massive and unfair effective monopoly on communication and information are different from unremarkable coffee shops.
Youtube does not hold monopoly on communication or information.
> it's an action that you want to force on them by some mechanism of public rage
Lol. :) Public rage you say? Where is the rage? :)
> I don't get the obsession with removing dumb online stunts.
Let me help you with that: This stunt was done in order to get attention. You fuel it with attention and there will be more stunts. Either from this dude or others. You remove the attention and it dies out on its own.
I believe, and many others seems to agree this stunt was potentially dangerous and we should have less of these in the future. Removing the video is the way to achieve that, keeping the video up is youtube profiting from a potentially dangerous stunt.
> Appealing to protected groups is the weakest argument you could ever make for "Businesses can censor whoever they like".
>Youtube does not hold monopoly on communication or information.
What, pray tell, is that other service that has several hundred million of viewers and thousands of hours of video being uploaded every hour?
As soon as you tell me it's name, I'm going to concede that YouTube is not a monopoly.
>Where is the rage?
Are you implying you just call for censorship as a hobby without even feeling angry? that's even worse.
>You remove the attention and it dies out on its own
This is demonstrably false, the guy who made the video didn't have a trend to draw inspiration from, he thought up of a dumb idea completely on his own. Even IF (a very big if) your model of how social imitation works is reasonably accurate and taking down the video really prevents any further stunts of those type, other influencers will simply think up of new dumb stunts like this.
Let me stress, again, that the world is not a kindergarten and you are not it's caretaker. If people want to crash aircrafts to get internet points, that's completely an issue between them and the relevant authorities, those bureaucrats suck up an awful lot of tax money, let them work for it for once.
You don't get to decide for the hundreds of millions who watch YouTube what's acceptable and what's not. I and countless other people fund this shitty public record with the attention we give to countless 20-second ads, and I want every recorded moment to stay recorded, at least until they go out of business. You don't have the right to force me to respect what offends or worries you, don't worry about public safety, let everyone worry about their own.
Ad revenue varies widely. Somewhere between $1k/million views and $10k/million views is most common.
Don't forget that each view on a big video is a chance of a subscription by that user, which leads to more views on followup videos, more sharing, more chance of sponsorships, etc. So the total revenue earned by a 'hit' video is actually much larger than it appears.
This plane was going to be scrapped before he purchased it. There was also an odd modified fuel selector visible in the cockpit that is unlikely to be allowed on a non-experimental aircraft. Seemed obvious that this wasn't a plane he intended to use regularly.
It depends a lot on the genre. Some pay $3-5 CPM I believe (so, $3k-5k per million). And that's just the youtube ads; once a channel gets a lot of subscribers they can attract external sponsors as well.
There used to be a sponsoring segment in the beginning, but, if I recall correctly, they ended the contract after the stunt became known and it was cut.
Affiliate link, not a sponsor. It's a common ruse by YouTubers to refer to them as sponsors to suggest that there's a negotiated commercial relationship when there isn't.
