
Twitter suspends Alex Jones for urging people to keep “battle rifles” ready - rbanffy
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/08/twitter-gives-alex-jones-one-week-time-out-for-inciting-violence/
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ddebernardy
Previous discussion on the topic:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17764760](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17764760)

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ProAm
We're treading into the land of censorship. As much as I dont like Alex Jones,
I think this is wrong.

~~~
cobythedog
Twitter is a not a government entity, so how is this censorship or leading to
it?

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WisNorCan
It is worth separating out the (less interesting) legal argument around the
1st amendment from the practical reality.

The reality is that private companies like Google, Twitter, etc. have more
power than the government to restrict speech. In fairness, tech companies have
been reluctant to wield that power and have been pushed into it.

~~~
majormajor
What if you flip this around: private companies like Twitter, etc, have
provided a mass-media platform to far more people than who could ever
broadcast globally in the past.

Is it so wrong for them to think maybe this wasn't a universal good?

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influx
A thought experiment, what if in the past the ink and paper makers had banded
together and prevented a newspaper from being able to publish? Is that OK
because the ink and paper companies are private and not the government?

There's been plenty of examples of yellow journalism where the press incited
the public into war, so there could be legitimate reasons private ink and
paper companies wouldn't want those messages broadcast.

~~~
pixelbath
The difference being that in this case, ink, paper and even printing presses
are readily available to everyone. The free private one-stop platform they
were using before is stopping them from publishing, but for negligible cost
almost anybody can publish what they like using their own private platform.

Nobody's taking down infowars.com, afaik.

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h4b4n3r0
This is the “Christian Bakery” moment for Twitter et al. You can’t at the same
time argue that a bakery must serve people whose politics it doesn’t like (you
can find photos of the baker in question with sympathetic gay folks, so he
doesn’t seem like a total homophobe to me) and do the exact same thing
yourself.

~~~
pulisse
It's illegal in Colorado for a business to refuse service to someone because
of their sexual orientation. That's the law under which the state tried to
penalize the baker.

Alex Jones violated Twitter's ToS by, among other things, encouraging armed
violence.

There's zero tension in thinking that both Twitter and the state of Colorado
acted defensibly in these two cases.

~~~
h4b4n3r0
One:
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1J01WU),
so Colorado is wrong.

Two: Using a figure of speech is not “encouraging armed violence”.

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licyeus
"People need to have their battle rifles and everything ready at their
bedsides" is not a figure of speech I've ever heard. Is Milo Yiannopoulos's
quote "I can't wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down
on sight" a similar figure of speech?

Excusing extreme calls-to-action after the fact as "figures of speech" gives
license to say _anything_ : when you've found you've gone too far, you can
simply walk it back and say it was metaphor. Should any of Milo's or Jones's
followers act on this, would you still say their comments were just figures of
speech?

~~~
benmmurphy
the second part of that quote makes it much less worse. 'everything ready at
their bedsides' implies resisting an armed attack as opposed to going out and
hurting other people. previously i'd only seen the 'battle rifles' ready part
of the quote in the media. though, possibly the rest of the context is
probably worse for jones :/

~~~
licyeus
Full context is available in a tweet linked in the article[1], but Jones
states "We're under attack and you know that and you've pointed out that
mainstream media is the enemy. But now it's time to act on the enemy...
They're coming and they're coming and they're coming. They think they can
really take down America. This is it." before urging his followers to have
rifles ready.

[1]
[https://twitter.com/mmfa/status/1029477795561463808](https://twitter.com/mmfa/status/1029477795561463808)

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akmarinov
Yet the president threatens millions with thermonuclear war on Twitter and
that’s just fine.

