Alex Jones shutdown on YouTube, Facebook, and Apple

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I have a very sound understanding if it. And thanks for singling me out for a reprimand, while letting the other guilty party in the discussion go on his merry way. If you read back up a few posts, you'll see that I tried to return the conversation to one of civility. But he continued to be snarky, so I returned it in kind. I don't have a problem with snarkiness, but let's be fair, shall we?

Please elaborate.

Sorry, I did only see your comment. Thanks for responding. But I do think that if you're talking about freedom of speech, it's in the context of the 14th ammendment of our constitution. It only protects you from government censorship, not censorship on public websites.

Why should I? You'll just find a reason to disagree and argue pointlessly with me.

But for other people I will elaborate: we only have a right to free speech because it's not illegal to voice our opinions. It is not an excuse to harass, bully or abuse other people online. Nor is it illegal to ban people online for being that way. People have a right not to have to listen to someone who thinks school shootings are fake and that it's perfectly fine to bully and abuse the parents and survivors an encourage others to do the same, but if you say anything negative about his *own* family he'll jump right down your throat, which is very hypocritical.

And that's all I'm going to say.

Always the trendsetter, Apple’s decisive action against the rightwing media outlet Infowars has led to an unprecedented domino effect. After Apple delisted podcast links, Spotify soon followed. Facebook made a decision to “unpublish” Infowars’ pages hours later, before the group’s main home, YouTube, said it had “terminated” the group’s channel, which was watched by 2.5 million subscribers (Alex Jones claims millions more have signed up since the ban).

Hundreds of well-intentioned campaigners, commentators and even journalists are celebrating the public hanging of Infowars – but this style of execution benefits no one.

The biggest internet platforms are increasingly society’s chief arbiters of free speech. Our conversations, relationships, businesses and democracies are increasingly mediated by a handful of global, for-profit companies.

Those companies are within their rights to set rules about who can and cannot share information on their sites – but Facebook and YouTube have become de facto global information services. Of the world’s 4 billion-plus internet users, more than 2 billion are active Facebook users

But the way in which the tech giants have dealt with Infowars doesn’t appear to be serious at all. The industry-wide no-platforming appears to be a herd-like PR exercise rather than a regulatory one. Despite the prevalence of misogynistic, race-baiting and some frankly bonkers Infowars content, the removals were not in relation to specific posts or videos and the reasons given were generalised ones. Even smaller companies such as Discus, LinkedIn, MailChimp and Pinterest have rushed into the industry dog-pile.

It may be that Infowars exceeded a prescribed number of strikes or warnings and, therefore, committed its own suicide – but it is vanishingly unlikely that Apple, Spotify, Facebook and YouTube, not to mention the others, all arrived at their own independent conclusions against Infowars at the same time purely by coincidence. If we are indeed witnessing international erasure on the basis of political opportunism rather than a specified threshold of the rules being breached, we should all have cause for concern.

Sensitive decisions about what is and is not permissible speech or information need to be made transparently and delivered honestly, objectively and equitably. The rules must be fair and, if they are breached, there should be clear, foreseeable consequences.

It is easy for people to accept or even congratulate the no-platforming of Infowars – but this watershed moment in the information age means it will not be the last group to be summarily unpublished, terminated and effectively thrown down the electronic memory hole without a specified explanation. And next time, people may not be so comfortable with the target.

For the tech giants to collectively erase Infowars with little explanation – despite the likely availability of multiple rule breaches, some of which I had reported myself – risks the appearance of arbitrary censorship, executed in concert. Surely the very worst way to convince conspiracy theorists that there is no conspiracy is for the world’s most powerful tech companies to simultaneously silence the most popular conspiracy theorist?

Just last week, it emerged that YouTube’s parent company, Google, is building a Chinese state-approved news app and search engine to deliver a highly censored world view to millions of citizens on behalf of the communist dictatorship.

Millions of Infowars’ mostly rightwing viewers and listeners will now feel a toxic combination of important and silenced.

they have escalated the very political information war Infowars has long claimed as its raison d’etre. And while Infowars may be one of the easiest political groups to purge, I fear it will not be the last.

Where did this quote come from?

I can't remember the legalistic details, but wasn't there supposed to be a ruling on whether or not monopolistic entities such as Facebook and Google/Youtube can be thought of as providing a service (I think that was the wording of it) and therefore more subject to the whole freedom of speech/expression thing than your average private company?

I can't remember the legalistic details, but wasn't there supposed to be a ruling on whether or not monopolistic entities such as Facebook and Google/Youtube can be thought of as providing a service (I think that was the wording of it) and therefore more subject to the whole freedom of speech/expression thing than your average private company?

I and others have been focused on the "shiny object" (They're private companies, they can do what they want) without seeing the big picture:

Tera, giga and mega corporations largely control speech on the planet now. Corporations.

Everyone ask yourself this and come up with an honest answer: Ten years ago would you have answered YES to the idea of the world's mega tech corporations being the collective arbiters of free speech on the planet as being a good thing?

I'm glad to finally see some people making this point after five pages. It was getting kind of tiring seeing people line up to say "private companies can ban who they like" as if that's all that ever needs to be said on the subject and as if saying so makes the person saying it look really smart. The mega-corporations who dominate the internet need to be regulated. If privates companies started denying people access to electricity and running water based on their political opinions I doubt many people here would support that, but apparently they're fine with a few internet giants deciding who can and cannot get their voice heard online.

It's hard to reason with people who think one simple statement shuts down any further discourse on the issue at hand. If they would add, "I don't mind social media platforms exercising the power to digitally erase a voice I find reprehensible. I don't mind that their decisions are arbitrary and politically motivated. I don't mind that there much more offensive voices that will remain untouched. This situation is perfectly fine with me."


I would accept that and wish them well.


Personally, I'd like to see fewer ranting lunatics like Alex Jones online, as well. But I'm not going to abandon my principles in favor of partisan politics. Free speech is not just under assault by the Left; the Right is equally guilty. They have their own version of politically correct that is designed, just like the Left, to shut down discourse. Donald Trump may be quite correct when he says MSM is "fake news." But he is just as much an enemy of free speech because he doesn't give two s**ts about the truth, only his truth as he sees it.