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Those saying the presumption of innocence is a narrow legal right, which has no bearing on the Brand case as yet, should realise what it is they are arguing for. Are we seriously suggesting that it is totally fine – not really a big deal – for the billionaires of Silicon Valley to take sides in serious criminal allegations, to punish the accused before the police have got their boots on?

You don’t have to reach for many hypotheticals before you see what a sinister development this is. Cliff Richard may not have made his money as a YouTuber. But are we now saying that he should have been unilaterally stripped of all his music royalties the moment he was accused in 2014 – by five separate men – of past child sex abuse, charges from which he was later exonerated?

I’m sure there are plenty of people making money on YouTube today who have been convicted, let alone accused, of violent crimes. Do we now think that, say, a musician, who may have done something heinous while a gang-affiliated young man but is now turning his life around, should be defunded for life? Where’s the line? Where’s the standard? Or is YouTube – as we all suspect – just making this stuff up as it goes along?

This is one of the most chilling things about the rise of Silicon Valley unpersoning – how arbitrary and reactive it is; how back-of-a-fag-packet its rules are. As soon as some scandal peeks over the horizon, the eggheads of Big Tech set about cooking up new punishments – or reaching into their archives of vaguely worded policies to get them out of today’s PR hitch. The upshot of all this is a byzantine regime of online control.

Just look at how far we’ve gone in the space of a decade. First ‘hate speech’ was censored. Then it was ‘misinformation’. Now you can be punished for your offline behaviour – and from decades ago, it seems. Surely, this is when we all have to admit that Big Tech clampdowns never had anything to do with platforms just being ‘responsible’, with limiting the spread of potentially ‘inflammatory’ or ‘inciting’ speech. It is now just a weapon used to punish those who have sparked the ire of the great and good. That some of them may well be genuine scumbags is besides the point. We’re rubber-stamping corporate tyranny here.

‘They’re private companies, they can do what they want’ – so goes the cry from alleged leftists, who suddenly become converts to free-market fundamentalism whenever cases like this arise. But they wilfully ignore how monopolising these platforms are in their respective fields. YouTube is not just a video platform, it is the video platform. It looms over the landscape. No other site comes within a country mile of it. Brand may well retreat to Rumble – the free-speech video site where he already has a big presence – but if he did, his content would reach a fraction of the people it does now.

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