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Alex Jones being kicked off those services isn't the same thing. He was spreading major misinformation and targeted harassment at innocent people that were invo

• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• fewfewf 6y ago
  You're really going to delegate censorship decisions to big tech? What's classes as "misinformation" should be our choice as consumers, not theirs. Example: David Icke may be a conspiracy theorist, but banning him is one step closer from Alex Jones towards a censorship nightmare. The slippery slope is 10ft behind and we're cruising down at 100 mph.
  • tyre 6y ago
    No we're not, calm down. Alex Jones is riling people up on conspiracy theories that actively do harm in order to make money. What happens if a private company removes him from their platform? … he can still post on his website? This isn't some Orwellian nightmare. A lot of people are trying to figure out how to balance absolute freedom with building a better collective human society. It's messy! People are messy! And sometimes we make mistakes, even with the best of intentions, even when we make the best choice with the information we have. It's not like they're kicking math off of YouTube. And, no, this isn't one step towards that.
    • tomcam 6y ago
      > Alex Jones is riling people up on conspiracy theories that actively do harm in order to make money. This is literally what Rachel Maddow did with the Russia conspiracy nonsense.
      • cameronbrown 6y ago
        It doesn't count when the popular side does it. /s
        • koolba 6y ago
          They only think they’re popular because they’re raving so loudly in the public square that they can’t hear the silent majority.
      • dwd 6y ago
        I avoid Rachel Maddow for the same reason I don't bother with the majority of Fox presenters. MSNBC is quite liberal and as much as I like Ari Melber, Chris Hayes and Nicole Wallace, they don't always keep their biases in check. Can be amusing* though to watch Wallace lose it over something Trump said. *I'm Australian, so my interest in US politics is largely entertainment.
      • danso 6y ago
        Let's go to specifics. Alex Jones is facing a civil suit alleging that he defamed the families of Sandy Hook victims, the harm from which include harassment and death threats from Jones' followers [0]. When you say that Maddow's coverage of Russiagate is "literally" the same: what actual harm – both in layperson's terms and legally actionable – do you see as a consequence? Defamation? Who would be the aggrieved and threatened party? Trump, personally? The U.S. law affords a much higher legal burden for the president of the U.S. (or anyone as public and powerful) to prove defamation. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/31/alex-jones-pay-sandy-hook-conspiracy-theory https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/31/alex-jones-p...
        • deleted 6y ago
  • stOneskull 6y ago
    there was a great talk by david icke i saw last year. i think it was in a central american country. man, it's hard to search for it. results are a lot crazier than him, for sure. i think he's a good bloke. his ayahuasca experience and talk of other dimensional beings isn't too different what joe rogan talks about sometimes. i see icke has some new media platform thing called Ickonic.. good luck to him.
  • rc_mob 6y ago
    “Big tech”? What are we 5?
    • ryan-allen 6y ago
      What if it was the investment banks controlling the censorship?
• alvah 6y ago
  "Alex Jones has every right to start his own network if he wants" Ah, the tired old "start your own Google / Facebook / Twitter / YouTube" trope. That can't be too hard /sarc Why is delegating (effective) censorship to Big Tech suddenly a good idea?
  • tyre 6y ago
    He doesn't have to start all of those things? He can go to alexjones.com and post whatever he wants.
  • tomlin 6y ago
    I mean, in general - yeah. But Alex Jones? I've personally launched a few streaming video platforms for audiences within the same # of listeners as AJ's demo - with far less money than AJ has. It's actually not that big of a deal to load an MP4 into a <video/> tag, turns out.
    • revnode 6y ago
      > It's actually not that big of a deal to load an MP4 into a <video/> tag, turns out. Kind of a big deal if you can't host that MP4 somewhere? If Google/Twitter/Facebook/etc. don't want your stuff ... chances are Amazon doesn't want to host it either. Even if you stand up your own hardware, you're at the mercy of whatever company is providing you the internet connection. Free speech as a principle isn't about hearing stuff you like. It's about hearing stuff you don't like. That's where the tolerance part of it comes in. When you're tolerating something, it means you're putting up with it even if you don't like it. And it's not about the law. Yeah, they can do whatever they want since they're private entities. It's about what values we choose to uphold as a society.
      • roblabla 6y ago
        Amazon isn't very likely to care what's hosted on their servers, as it's not as likely to be damaging - both in terms of brand and of legal liability. You don't know a website is hosted on Amazon Web Services the same way you know a video is hosted on Youtube.
• AQuantized 6y ago
  If it could be guaranteed to be limited to the Alex Joneses of the world, I would wholly agree with this. However, now that a strong majority of the influential communication that takes place in society is divided across perhaps 5 tech platforms, with 1 tech company controlling the ability to search for other platforms, it's hard to say getting booted off all platforms isn't functionally restricting freedom of speech. At what point do we concede that allowing a small set of 'private companies' carte blanche over public discourse is a restriction of public freedom?
  • chillwaves 6y ago
    If a regular user can be banned from Youtube for violating their TOS, what makes Alex Jones special and immune from community moderation? Either a site has the right to moderate its users or it doesn't.
• chroma 6y ago
  You are conflating two forms of free speech: The right to freedom of speech enshrined in the constitution and the norm of free speech that we all tend to grant each other. Of course YouTube is a private company and can ban and delete whatever they want. But they are breaking a norm and the consequences of that may be worse than the consequences of letting us watch videos of crazy people. I've said it before and I'll keep on saying it: The original formulations of freedom of speech weren't about protecting the rights of the speaker or writer. They were about protecting the rights of those who wanted to listen or read. Every time you ban a document or silence a speaker, you are also preventing people from reading what they want to read or hearing what they want to hear. That harm is far greater than whatever happens to the author. Again, YouTube is a private company and they can do whatever they want when it comes to curating the information they store. I would be against any law that compelled them to host information that they didn't want to host. But in the long run, I think their current policy is extremely counterproductive. Imagine if YouTube existed 30 years ago. Would they have banned atheist views? Would they have banned videos critical of Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal? What about videos endorsing transgender ideas? Many views that were considered crazy at that time are now acceptable today. Suppressing heterodox views means that fewer are exposed to them and moral progress is impeded. Yes, most fringe ideas are bullshit, but every once in a while we stumble onto a diamond: Slavery is wrong. Men and women should have the same rights. Homosexuals should have the same rights as heterosexuals. Etc. These were all extremely controversial ideas when they first came into the public sphere. Earlier versions of our society suppressed them as dangerous misinformation. So far, we haven't figured out a way to separate good ideas from bad ones besides exposing people to them and seeing which memes reproduce in the population. In other words: If you ban people like Alex Jones, you also ban people who are activists for causes that society will adopt in the future. And we all end up worse off. There are certainly views that we hold today that future generations will condemn us for. Better that we discover them sooner rather than later.
  • danso 6y ago
    What original formulations of freedom of speech do you refer to? edit: also, not sure if you lived through the 90s. But none of the examples you gave were off-limits for TV or radio.
• IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
  Ok. But you cant have it both ways. If this is the official position of google et al, that they should be free to boot people pf their platform. Fine. They are no longer pipes. They are editors for content. As such. The agnostic pipes defense is no longer valid. I would like to put my army of lawyers on attack mode to sue the sh*t out of them for copyright infringement, for trafficking stolen property, facilitating crimes etc. You serve your dish and bow you must eat it.
• fetbaffe 6y ago
  Shouldn’t government accounts be banned too then? Every government has spread major misinformation & harassed innocent people. How about CNN? They do it too.
• ALittleLight 6y ago
  Alex Jones was banned from YouTube, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and Spotify pretty much simultaneously and after years of successful use of each service. You can argue that the conspiracy to remove him from those platforms was a good thing, but I don't think it is reasonable to suggest that each of the platforms coincidentally decided to boot him at the same time. They clearly coordinated to ban him, they didn't coordinate in public, so I think it makes it quite clear he was actually conspired against. It also strikes me as a bit disingenuous to suggest that because he can just go create his own Twitter or his own YouTube and host things there he wasn't censored. He technically could, but that doesn't change the impact of banning him from the major services. It seems as perfectly clear that they are censoring him as it is that the big tech companies conspired to do so. Again, you may argue that it is right to censor Jones - he is either a liar or crazy, but it makes no sense to argue that he wasn't censored. I think in isolation, it would be better if Jones didn't share his opinions. But if I had to pick between realities, and in one Jones was free to spread his conspiracy theories, and in the other big companies get to decide what we can and cannot say online? Well, it's a pretty obvious choice for me.
  • TomMarius 6y ago
    There was no conspiracy, and no censorship. He broke rules of all these platforms and the final straw pushed all platform owners to enforce their rules, that's it. It should be obvious to anyone that Facebook or Google or any other company can't be expected to publish anything anyone wants (did you even read the rules?) - since the dawn of the Internet we had to set up our own servers for that purpose. How is Facebook different from any old phpBB forum? Bans were often given for fun during these days!
    • ALittleLight 6y ago
      If there was no conspiracy you think it was a coincidence that he was banned across all major platforms at the same time after using them for years? I guess I can kind of see how it is possible to believe that it was a coincidence that all companies banned him simultaneously. It's obviously overwhelmingly unlikely that it was a coincidence, but that is at least a coherent thing to believe. On the other hand, I cannot say the same for the claim that there was "no censorship". What do you call banning people because you don't like what they have to say and want to stop them from sharing their viewpoint if not censorship? If you want to argue that Jones should be censored, that seems like a rational and worthwhile conversation. I don't get how you can argue that he wasn't censored though. Regarding how Facebook, Apple, Twitter, YouTube, and Spotify are different than a random phpBB forum, I think I'll just leave that one as an exercise for the reader...
• bitwize 6y ago
  And when upstream service providers cut him off, he can start his own one of those. When payment processors close all his accounts, he can start one of those. Remember, kids, censorship refers to the government and only the government. Stray far enough onto the wrong side of history, and society may voluntarily decide you're an asshole and show you the door. And that'll be on you.
  • gadders 6y ago
    He could end up like Laura Loomer and get banned from Uber, Uber Eats etc as well.
  • koheripbal 6y ago
    I hate Alex Jones, but I have to agree. There's a difference between being kicked out of a restaurant for being an ass, vs being kicked out of EVERY restaurant on Earth for the rest of your life - without due process. These online services aren't small mom/pop shops that you can just replace and patronize another. They are global near-monopolies that you cannot function without. Google isn't just my search provider - they run my email, my internet connection, my cell service, my company's cloud repository, etc... They could destroy me at the drop of a hat.
    • a10c 6y ago
      > Google isn't just my search provider - they run my email, my internet connection, my cell service, my company's cloud repository, You have no alternative to any of those services?
    • tim333 6y ago
      I'm skeptical of "kicked out of EVERY restaurant on Earth" The Daily Stormer is fairly bad as sites go "Jews Howl as Portuguese Move to Shut Down Their Citizenship Scam" typical story - and after various attempts to get rid of them all you have to do to go to the site is google them and click on the link in the wikipedia page. About the only sites that are really kicked out of all restaurants are paedophila ones and they deserve that and more IMO.
• stef25 6y ago
  These platforms policing content surely was the beginning of the end, they're getting dragged in to every he-said-she-said fight you can think of and it puts them right smack in the middle of the great culture wars that are now raging online. They should have just drawn the line at legality & calls to violence and everything else well ... deal with it. "We're a platform, not a publisher". Naval Ravikant basically said this, on JRE.
• gerland 6y ago
  > Free speech doesn't mean everyone is forced to listen to that speech. You are completely right. Free speech does not mean that anyone will force you to listen to Alex Jones or any other nutjob. It means that AJ will have the right to speak and you can ignore him. From the top of my head, let me just list a few of the poeople that were considered crazy and could not initialy find a platform to express their ideas: Clair Patterson E. Cuyler Hammond Albert Einstein Marie Curie Sklodowska Nikola Tesla You get my point?
  • raxxorrax 6y ago
    > You get my point? If have come to the conclusion that you either get why people defend his presence as a price for many advantages or you do not. These are not the people that buy his "man-oil". Some say the smarter ones give in, although that should not be applied on this topic in my opinion. > Free speech doesn't mean everyone is forced to listen to that speech. It is just a personal dislike of Alex Jones, not an elaborate thought. Not that hard to sympathize with, which makes defense against content regulation quite exhausting. But it is also a lie, since nobody was forced to listen to Alex Jones at all. We have seen targeted harassment against Russians by mainstream media outlets. It is the same strain of reasoning, although I would put it anywhere near reason to be honest.
    • gerland 6y ago
      I hope I won't go too close to breaching the Godwin's law, but there seem to be some analogies to Herschel Grynszpan here. We can always find an outlier that would be a good excuse for an overblown reaction. We can also probably find outliers on the other side of the spectrum, but we choose to ignore them. Conveniently.
  • antientropic 6y ago
    When were Einstein or Curie ever considered crazy or deplatformed?
    • gerland 6y ago
      Einstein was refused publication and ridiculed until Bohr, who was an authority, vouched for him. Madam Curie had to publish under her husbands name, because her publications were rejected on the basis that she was a woman.
• cm2187 6y ago
  So McCarthyism was ok then, where you couldn’t find any job in Hollywood if you had leftist views? Private companies free to enforce the ideology they want.
• unishark 6y ago
  > And stop with these "censorship" BS. It is clearly censorship. The fact is simply that censorship is perfectly legal for private companies to engage in. Though when a private company starts to become a monopoly people often start trying to regulate it like a public utility. A separate argument is whether customers and partners want to support a private company which engages in behavior they dislike such as censorship. Rogan also has every right to take his business elsewhere for such reasons, if that is actually what happened.
• codeddesign 6y ago
  1. Be realistic. He wasn’t on Nickelodeon with a very large following. Google and YouTube have a heavy bias, that isn’t new news. 2. If your ISP starting preventing you from viewing HN, would that be censorship or their own right? Since you have your own right to start your own ISP. 3. If I own a cake business, is it perfectly acceptable to refuse to make a cake for a gay couple? (We all know how that turned out)
• JSavageOne 6y ago
  Youtube is a platform, Nickelodeon is a television channel. What a nonsensical comparison.