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Twitter did not suspend Alex Jones or Infowars
- m_ke 8y agoWill be interesting to watch twitter die once Trump is out of office.
- splitrocket 8y agoI wonder if there’s a case to be made that continuing to provide a platform to Alex Jones effectively creates a toxic working environment for Twitter employees. Could be a great deal of liability there.
- willio58 8y agoWhat about the other hundreds of thousands of outwardly racist twitter users? Just ban them all? They’ll just congregate in their own communities.
- splitrocket 8y agoWell, the key element, I’d imagine in such a suit would be knowledge of and active approval of such behavior. If the executives knowingly and willfully continue to allow white supremacists and people like Alex Jones, then enterprising Twitter employees who fit a certain profile might never need to work again.
- WiseWeasel 8y agoWhy is it a problem for Twitter if they push the hate elsewhere? Of course accounts publishing outwardly racist or otherwise bigoted content should be banned, just like they'd get insta-banned from HN. That's what makes this a nice place, unlike Twitter.
- alphabettsy 8y agoMaybe they should stop allowing anonymity then? Like communities who disallowed hooded marchers to discourage the Klan.
- xupybd 8y agoGood work Twitter. Alex Jones is a liar and a nut but free speech is more important than preventing a liar and a nut from having a platform.
- sdenton4 8y agoThere are plenty of other platforms that would love to have him. Like, say, Stormfront. And the advantage of pushing this crap to those margins is that it denies them legitimacy. Push it out to stormfront (or equivalent) and it's real clear where it sits in the marketplace of ideas. Leave it on the big platforms and you make it clear that bad behavior is tolerated and rewarded.
- everdev 8y agoExactly. Governments shouldn't be drawing these lines but someone needs to and corporations are a good choice. If people don't like it they can vote with their dollars. If companies make the wrong move their business will suffer, so they're incentivized to do the popular thing at least. If the wrong thing becomes popular to the majority, then we're all screwed anyway.
- slowmovintarget 8y ago> ...corporations are a good choice. Wow is that not true. Corporate entities only have a profit incentive. They are by their nature divorced from morality and the philosophy and ethics of freedom. When unrestricted, corporations force people into indentured servitude. Corporations used child labor, until they were forced not to. The freedom to exchange ideas is the most extraordinary and valuable freedom humans have. This is why we absolutely do not trust it to popular opinion either. Corporations handed control of that freedom would filter and twist expression until only those ideas that profit the corporations are left. We've already seen this in action. The mildest examples are gag orders from lawsuit settlements, suppression of medical research, suppression of safety testing... It's why we have whistle-blower laws. Corporations would be a terrible choice.
- dubrocks 8y agoGood. Political speech, which conspiracy theories are, is the speech most in need of protection.
- xbmcuser 8y agoThey can't ban him unless they are willing to ban Trump who says similar stuff.
- justinph 8y agoThey should ban Trump.
- tomhoward 8y agoThey won’t ban a world leader and it’s unreasonable to expect them to.
- jazzyjackson 8y agoWhat makes him so special? He's not King, and Twitter doesn't have any government contracts.
- tomhoward 8y agoIt's nothing to do with him, it's to do with the position of head of state or head of government of any country or international political body. For Twitter to block anybody in such a position would be a step too far into playing an active role in the political process, and would open a can of worms by forcing them into the role of determining which other political leaders or contenders should be allowed or banned.
- tomhoward 8y agoNo, different rules apply for world leaders. Their position on Jones is that he hasn’t broken their ToS on their platform, but they will ban him if he does.
- justinph 8y agoDisgusting. Twitter is trying to hold on to relevance by staying the mainstream medium where demagogues discuss their garbage. The world would be a better place if they kicked off the white supremacists and the jerks, but their stock price would take a hit. To me, it's an easy decision (I'm a shareholder, the stock is already in the toilet), but one twitter has consistently abdicated.
- equivocate 8y agoWhat about Asians or other non-whites who post anti-white hate speech, like Sarah Jeong?
- pwaai 8y agoanybody still actively use twitter?
- StanislavPetrov 8y agoIf you only defend the speech of people you agree with, you are against free speech and a free society.
- vyodaiken 8y agoAsking Twitter to enforce its rules fairly is not an attack on free speech.
- Fukkaudeku 8y agoI am against free speech and a free society and I am proud to say that.
- StanislavPetrov 8y agoAt least your honest about it. Hypocrites who claim to support free speech and a free society while seeking to silence those who disagree are despicable.
- 8iterations 8y ago"Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge" is my favorite work by Karl Popper. His 1945 work on the Paradox of Tolerance seems more appropriate here.
- Bendingo 8y agoAgreed. Especially his statements [1]: "...as long as we can counter them (the tolerant) by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise" and "it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant" The behaviour that Popper warns about (forbidding rational argument and answering arguments with force) sounds more like the left, than Alex Jones. [2] [3] [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance#cite_note-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance#cite_note... [2] - https://edition.cnn.com/2018/06/25/politics/maxine-waters-trump-officials/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2018/06/25/politics/maxine-waters-tr... [3] - http://dailycaller.com/2018/08/06/antifa-windows-marine-corps-berkeley/ http://dailycaller.com/2018/08/06/antifa-windows-marine-corp...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- equivocate 8y agoYes. And that's why Communists, like our own Steve Klabnik, should not be permitted to post here, on Twitter, and beyond, given the abysmal record of communists (e.g., in the USSR, North Korea, and China) tolerating dissent.
- sctb 8y agoWe've banned this account.
- mjwhansen 8y agoTo me, the crux of the problem is how the platforms see themselves, vs. how many in media and the informed general public see them. The informed general public opinion seems to be that Facebook and Twitter have mainstream media-level responsibility, i.e., with great distribution, comes great power, comes great responsibility. They are akin to newspapers in a way in this view, and have a responsibility to only promote reasoned perspectives. Facebook and Twitter, on the other hand, seem to see themselves more like a grocery store magazine rack, which have carried a wide variety of magazines including conspiratorial BS like the National Enquirer for years without any controversy whatsoever. These two positions seem to be at loggerheads and operating on completely different planes.
- WiseWeasel 8y agoThe grocery store typically won't carry The Weekly Bigot or Jihad Monthly; even the Enquirer has standards.
- narrator 8y agoIt seems that everything was running just fine according to plan until Trump was elected and now there's a huge crusade to use all the technological might of Google, Facebook, etc to shut down whatever caused that to happen and save democracy. I hear a lot of technological luminaries in AI and technology saying the next most important thing that has to be done is to end "fake news". That big tech is hiring in AI to detect "hate". It's a Manhattan project to save the status quo! Forget slaughterbots, or rogue AI, the real disruptive technology that is going to end the world and requires coordinated action by all the major players is Alex Jones with a social media account! The media has been highly controlled since the broadcast era with a small oligopoly of federally licensed broadcasters allowed to conduct mass influence operations. Since the 1996 telecommunications act things have gotten more and more centralized till we have 5 companies that control 90% of media, so of course people are looking for other options. Congrats to Twitter for being the least technologically adept company and thus being kind of garbage at censorship thus leading to them being the vanguard of free speech.
- notthemessiah 8y agoRecently twitter was auto-suspending everybody who had "Elon Musk" as a subset of their name, including parody accounts such as "Italian Elon Musk" or puns involving the name. Twitter goes out of their way to prevent anything resembling fraud reguarding the blue-checkmarked accounts, yet if you have one, you're able to spew as much bullshit as you want. Who gets a blue-checkmark is a rather arbitrary selection process, and Alex Jones retains his despite launching harassment campaigns against Sandy Hook victims. If you don't want to suspend the account, why not take away his coveted blue checkmark?
- tomjakubowski 8y ago@alexqarbuckle changed his account display name to "Italian Elon Musk" for a dumb but hilarious bit and lost his blue checkmark over it. So that's where the line is, I guess. https://twitter.com/alexqarbuckle/status/1008257043843690497 https://twitter.com/alexqarbuckle/status/1008257043843690497
- p3nt3ll3r 8y agoThis guy lied about mass shootings and encouraged the bullies to physically torment the parents of the victims. But sure, let's treat him as an equal. Twitter is a cesspool.
- sadris 8y ago>encouraged the bullies to physically torment the parents of the victims Can you cite this? Never heard of that.
- juvinious 8y agoI hear/read this regurgitated in many comments about AJ as well as him calling for assassinating President Obama. Yet the evidence for this never materializes. This seems more like poisoning the well to avoid any discussion/argumentation.
- dredmorbius 8y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/business/media/alex-jones-sandy-hook.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/business/media/alex-jones... https://www.snopes.com/news/2018/04/17/sandy-hook-parents-sue-conspiracy-troll-alex-jones/ https://www.snopes.com/news/2018/04/17/sandy-hook-parents-su... http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2016/sep/01/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-correct-austins-alex-jones-said-no/ http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2016/sep/01/hilla... https://newtownpostexaminer.com/2014/09/25/sandy-hook-hoaxers-misrepresent-fbi-crime-stats/ https://newtownpostexaminer.com/2014/09/25/sandy-hook-hoaxer... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_shooting_conspiracy_theories#Alex_Jones_claims https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School...
- jazzyjackson 8y agoHacker News commentators seem to be falling for troll strategies that should be obvious by now. Don't assume the people in this conversation are acting in good faith, that's what they exploit.
- marenkay 8y agoThis is such an interesting dilemma in terms of laws and ethics, and there is literally no way out without being shunned. This is an online business, which laws actually apply? Company incorporation location, account location, reader location? All of them? Twitter has usage terms, did he actually violate a single one of them so far? If yes, which one? If no, wouldn't it be illegal to ban him without reason based on ToS? Then there is the interesting question of responsibility. In capitalism it usually boils down to he who has ownership also has responsibility, which is the price for being on the owning side. So if your small shop around the corner sells Nazi propaganda, it will very likely be closed down. So why do we treat these so called platforms as if they were a piece of paper? Paper is no business. It just exists, whereas platforms are companies and have intentions. Money is the goal, so responsibility should be there. Which leads to ethics: all things considered, does an abstract concept such as morale mandate we only accept truth, wisdom, right things? Finally the biggest question of all IMHO: if we as a society can not rely on the majority making the "right" decision, then does it even matter if people who spread lies are banned since we failed as a society so badly that this is the least of our issues.