According to Billet themselves, they heard nothing about compensation or payback until about 3 hours after the original GN video went live… Which Billet hadnt even replied to before Linus made his post saying they’ve already made the deal on compensation.
That has got to be the most corrupted take that could be possible taken from that.
You know what serves the public good? Reporting on it, So people can see what the company is doing, So they don’t get away with turning off the valve for a couple days… So they get held accountable for having the valve at all, and the exposure forcing them to spend their money on cleanup and decontamination, while the public outcry gets so bad that government steps in with regulation, and legislation, and oversight.
You know what doesnt serve the public good? Letting the corpo hide its shit and get away with everything, because you think theres some insignificant, nonexistent benefit to letting it do so.
By not letting Linus use his position to try and pressure Steve, by not giving Linus time to get a coverup in place, Linus got outed for lying about the Billet compensation, Further showing the lengths he’ll go to, to lie, double down, and shift blame to anything but himself.
You still report. You don’t stop reporting.
But what is the difference here? GN made a video. LMG made a gaslighting response. Maybe a fraction of the people who cared are going to watch the GN HW News update and see that get refuted.
Versus: GN made a video. A day before it launched, LMG tried to do some bullshit. GN calls out that bullshit with receipts. The audience of the original video see everything
At the end of the day: Meaningful change is unlikely. I don’t expect LMG to change much (outside of doing scrapwars again or whatever to recover lost subscribers). But I think “You might stop doing shitty stuff a day earlier” is not a good reason to not solicit comment.
Again, I don’t think a comment is required considering the original video (and this one) are literally responding TO comments. But if the Billet section was “Shortly after reaching out for comment, Billet informed us that LMG had finally returned their calls and offered to pay them back. We will keep an eye on the outcome of this” then… it doesn’t change much. Other than removing one aspect of the gaslighting response LMG sent.
And same with the toxic waste example. If the outcome is Julia Roberts talking into a camera about how Mr Burns stopped dumping toxic waste shortly after being approached for comment but that watch groups will be keeping an eye on this: The end result is likely the same. The waste starts back up a few weeks later. But that is one less week of toxic waste being dumped.