
Alex Jones is a crackpot–but banning him from Facebook might be a bad idea - shawndumas
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/op-ed-alex-jones-is-a-crackpot-but-banning-him-from-facebook-might-be-a-bad-idea/
======
geofft
> _Booting someone like Jones from Facebook or YouTube altogether could easily
> turn him into a martyr among his paranoid fans._

This would be significantly less of a problem if he didn't somehow have a
legion of paranoid fans ready to consider him a martyr. Wonder how they got
there.

This article understates Jones' Sandy Hook activities, by the way: the parents
of one of the victims have moved seven times because their address keeps
getting published to those paranoid fans, and they now live hundreds of miles
from their child's grave. In response to the lawsuit, Jones has claimed that
the parents are public figures because of their involvement in gun control
politics, so he can say what he likes about them to those paranoid fans.

~~~
the_solenoid
Stochastic Terrorism in action. You skirt free-speech limiting by baiting the
already unhinged, then the thing you "didnt ask anyone to do" happens.

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ddtaylor
Not that I agree with it but the safe strategy for any big company is to ban
anything that seems risky since 95% of content most users consume is benign
which is what keeps them on the platform.

~~~
vorpalhex
If social media platforms have devolved into only cat memes and sponsored
clothing shoots, that's pretty disappointing for the human race. While
crackpots like Alex Jones are objectionable to all people of sense, I don't
trust Facebook/Twitter/Et Al to act as arbitrators of free speech.

~~~
235rt2vf
They wouldn't have to be the arbitrators if there was a free market for social
networking with different instances that set their own rules.

The real issue is that Facebook is a publisher only when it benefits them, and
a dumb pipe all other times. Either regulate it like a phone company, and
force free speech on the platform, or force interoperability so Facebook
alternatives can have a level playing field.

~~~
ddtaylor
YouTube seems to have had a lot of success with the same strategy. They are a
private company and not required to host content that constitutes fair use
because, well, terms of service says they can. I don't agree with it and it's
one of the reasons I don't publish on the platform anymore.

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cryoshon
well, here are the stakes.

de-platforming emboldens and somewhat substantiates their narrative that they
are being persecuted. peripheral followers may view this as a confirmation of
what they have said, and draw closer to them, following them to a new
platform.

NOT de-platforming them allows their repeated publications to reach a wider
audience. gradually, peripheral followers are attracted anyway, and the loyal
followers may become more zealous over time.

the real problem here is that both of these possibilities assume that people
are 100% passive and 100% fixed in terms of their susceptibility to propaganda
or non-mainstream theories.

the sad thing is that alex jones is not remotely persuasive to anyone with a
modicum of critical thinking. the debate around whether de-platforming is
useful or not is the wrong debate. the debate should be about how we can make
the public more critical and more endowed with the ability to think! an
intellectually vicious public is not a public that cares much about whether
alex jones is allowed to blather because the blathering has little impact even
if it is in a public area.

the elitists will jump in and say that the public will never be able to think
for themselves. but it's to the advantage of those in power to never try to
make the public intelligent and critical. we haven't even tried.

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aaron-lebo
The article says as much, but this is a hard problem with no great solutions.

Some of the places that traffic in Jones kind of craziness are the conspiracy
and greatawakening subreddits. The former is absurdly abused by the mods while
Holocaust deniers and child abuse accusations run rampant (this is why that's
not cool Musk) and you get banned for opposing that and other lunacy.

The latter subreddit is kind of terrifying. It's straight on cult behavior
complete with subprophets with obvious mental illness breaking down their
supposed communications from Trump and "Q" \- and people not only believe it
but celebrate it.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/greatawakening/comments/9284sg/trum...](https://www.reddit.com/r/greatawakening/comments/9284sg/trump_told_us_q_was_going_to_post_again_soon/)

I've no doubt this existed before (how did the militant movements organize
prior to Waco and OKC?) but I wonder if the spread of some of this lunacy (Q)
would be possible if the platform wasn't provided to them. I kind of wait for
the day that Reddit has to shut that down because of how bad it looks, but I
hope it's not because of some violent and paranoid act fueled by it.

~~~
Lendal
Yeah, it was a pretty good article with good ideas. But Facebook and Google
can't do everything about this issue. The fear and anger which give rise to
conspiracy theories are part of being human. We've always been a violent,
deceitful species. We have to find ways to acknowledge who we are and deal
with it better than we have been. We can't just censor the madness and pretend
it doesn't exist. The madness will break out in uncontrolled ways.

------
xoa
I consider myself an extremely strong First Amendment advocate and "free
speech absolutist" when it comes to government force, and I am also
uncomfortable about where the line should be for "private entities" that
manage to achieve quasi-governmental levels of power, though I do not think
that any level of non-violent restriction is directly comparable to censorship
via the government's monopoly on physical force.

That said, a major question for me that has been growing bigger and bigger in
my mind over the last decade is what exactly should be Free Speech's answer to
denial of cognition attacks (and I want to be extra clear that it is a
question, I have not been able to come to at all a satisfactory universal
answer myself yet). Likely everyone on HN will be familiar with the concept of
resource exhaustion attacks in the context of computers and networks. DOS
mitigation has regrettably become a near requirement for any significant
public facing Internet service. But fundamentally resource exhaustion attacks
apply equally well to humans. In the idealized world of discussion and debate
and philosophy abstract models of conduct are often used, but at the end of
the day "implementation" still comes down to individual humans, each of whom
only has so much mental capacity and so much time. And many arguments
involving reality can easily be asymmetric too: it takes very little time and
energy to make an assertion but a great deal to disprove it. Reality is under
no obligation to be simple and elegant to human preferences.

I have seen this get put into practice with ever greater sophistication on a
lot of my favorite forums. Someone arguing BS will throw out a bunch of simple
stuff that takes a great deal of careful posting to show is wrong. If people
volunteer their time to answer in that thread, it does no good in preventing
the exact same assertions from being tossed out again (maybe remixed) in a new
thread a week or month or whatever later. Eventually people just get tired or
are busy. If they try to point towards a centralized source instead, that
source can then be attacked and you see "argument from authority durr" and the
like thrown out. It's bad faith but in a way that exploits a lot of the norms
around free speech and argumentation, which classically didn't have the same
scaling and automation threats.

I'm not sure what the answer is but we do clearly have a problem as some of
the previous natural barriers due to cost of speech have fallen. It is common
to speak of a "Marketplace of Ideas" when it comes to Free Speech, but it's
important to remember that "Free Markets" are specific real tools that require
regulatory support to function and have no goals of their own. Costs need to
be internalized, information and processing ability needs to be symmetric,
there needs to be a shared base of legal structure and norms to work on top
of. Getting too far away from that results in market failure. I don't know how
that might be translated to Free Speech but I do think we're seeing a "market
of ideas failure" to some extent right now, and that it could easily get much
worse in the near future unchecked. There is a need for better ways to improve
the signal/noise cost function, and for systems to re-internalize that the
_point_ of Free Speech, of marketplaces of ideas or markets of anything at
all, is to come up with _good_ products. They're tools to serve humanity. Bad
ones shouldn't be banned by force but they shouldn't be flourishing either, if
they are then something isn't working.

~~~
actsasbuffoon
The technique you're referring to is called the Gish Gallop. I've also heard
it colloquially referred to as the Asymmetry of Bullshit.

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falcolas
I believe the term being looked for is "martyr".

Being banned from prominent platforms in a country which professes to believe
in free speech (professes, because there's a bunch of caveats) is only going
to boost the signal.

This (in concert with the banning of certain DNS entries) is going to bite us
in the ass. Of course, what else are we to do?

~~~
gammateam
It is free expression for the privately run platforms to ban him.

~~~
falcolas
And there's one of the caveats I mentioned.

Of course, it raises the concern - it's not the platform exercising free
speech, it's a couple of individuals acting on behalf of the legal entity that
owns the platform. Treating the platform, or the legal entity, as a being
capable of expressing themselves - let's be honest with ourselves - is just a
shield for the company owners to express themselves without being held
accountable.

~~~
gammateam
its those couple of individuals prerogative. it was never a discussion about
the platform it was a discussion about the legal entity. what is there a need
to be honest about, what segment of the society is confused about that, I'm
personally not familiar with those people and it doesn't anything about what I
understand is congruent with the constitutional social contract of the
privately run platform to exercise their free expression to boot off someone
is also exercising their free expression.

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SuoDuanDao
Every great advancement looks like a crackpot idea until it doesn't. The
beauty of a public space is that anyone can bring their soapbox and share
their beliefs, that most minority beliefs are wrong doesn't detract from the
value of accessible minority beliefs.

~~~
geofft
I think there's a pretty clear distinction between ideas that are commonly
seen as wrong-as-in-factually-incorrect that need to be protected for the sake
of the advancement of ideas, like the earth moving around the sun, and ideas
that are commonly seen as wrong-as-in-harmful, like the idea that the parents
of the Sandy Hook victims are paid actors and deserve harassment and stalking.

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zouhair
No it's not. Dangerous people shouldn't be allowed platforms. You have to make
it harder and harder for them to get a following.

~~~
atlantic
Obvious question: who decides who the dangerous people are? You?

~~~
zouhair
White supremacists ideas are dangerous ideas, always.

