If Twitter wants to ban him, then they can ban him. I honestly don’t know how he gained so much publicity as a conspiracy theorist, but he sounds like someone who’s drive is to continuously poke the sleeping bear and bother people for the sake of being an asshole. Abusive behavior was his business model.
I'm not a fan of Alex Jones. I think Alex Jones was at his worst during Sandy Hook when he accused the victims families of being crisis actors. I think if social media platforms had banned him then, I would have understood the decision and applauded them.
What I can't understand is the decision of major social media platforms to ban him now. His content now isn't any more out of the ordinary or abusive than at any other point in his broadcasting history. So it just seems strange that facebook, twitter, youtube, apple and spotify all come together and ban him at the same time. And it seems even stranger that none of these companies can give even a vague hint at the specific content he was banned for. I'm not saying they have to broadcast the actual content but something along the lines of "harmful, defamatory and malicious speech directed against Sandy Hook victims" could work.
Silicon valley is starting to look more and more like a tech oligopoly. It seems like these huge corporations are having discussions behind closed doors and making decisions that have a major impact on the public discourse.
This may have something to do with: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/ny-news-conspiracy-... I think the Russia investigation has unearthed links between conspiracy theorists and efforts to divide and undermine US politics and these companies were warned behind the scenes to stop being complicit (or perhaps they had a inter-company meeting, Bilderberg-style). Also there was a concerted effort by media companies to have Jones banned. They kept him in the news cycle for weeks. Finally, the left united to have him banned, made him an issue and visible to employees of these companies.
Twitter isn’t going to broadcast or link to tweets that were bad enough to merit a ban, for obvious reasons- they’re banning it precisely to avoid having that content be propagated any further.
This is circular reasoning, and it conveniently excuses any abuses or hypocrisy by the company by disappearing the evidence and not allowing anyone else to judge for themselves.
From an outside observer, there is no way to distinguish between the claim that the ban is for "good reasons", or that the ban is a result of bias on the part of the company.
This is the same reasoning that leads to people getting banned from a service for a reason, and then given a cold shoulder and absolutely no information about why.
Perhaps this is fine in situations where the banned entity is a malicious actor, but it presumes a zero false-positive rate. My opinion is, if even one person is wrongly punished without recourse (other than rolling the dice with social media) then the whole system is unjust and should be reworked.
Given that the collective output of Twitter users has risen to the level of having massive influence, perhaps it's time we rethink how "freedom of speech" meshes with "private service".
For example, when it comes to publicly-available services such as this, we often hear about people referring to "Twitter's freedom of speech" in terms of censorship of its users, which boggles my mind. Twitter provides a publicly-accessible service that allows users to post short entries, and when they prevent someone else from posting something, it basically amounts to "Twitter's right to free speech is more important than the user's ability to speak" and that seems a bit counter-intuitive.
If Twitter's policies are unjust, then Twitter does not deserve the level of influence that it has. My opinion is that such a service could not have been foreseen by the writers of the Constitution. In their day, the greatest threat to freedom of speech was the government. Remember, they had just fought for their independence from England. I don't think they could have envisioned a world where the greatest threat to free speech would come from the private sector.
And if we're not careful, we're about to be making it worse. As it stands, platform operators are not generally liable for the things they automatically publish on behalf of their users, outside of certain highly egregious things (such as child abuse imagery), and even then only if they don't follow the proper procedure with regards to reporting to law enforcement, etc. If that ever changes, expect freedom of speech to be null and void in context of the Internet.
What makes you think that they said that Twitter must be just? Why not simply should be just? Why would you not want a platform as large and integral to modern open communication to be just?
No it's not, because Twitter itself has presumably reviewed the messages itself. As a service owner, and therefore an arbiter, it doesn't need to allow anyone to judge themselves.
You are correct. However, Twitter is not a govt with checks and balances for the purposes of accountability. It is a company and their judgement, like most companies, is part of the product.
What transparency would you find acceptable? Do you hold other companies to that level? I dont know the books for my local grocery store, I dont know their justifications or reasonings for what they do or dont stock, when they decide to hire, or what rules they hire for.
I'm not trying to be antagonistic or dismissive - I am far from an "anything goes" libertarian (or a libertarian of any kind) but if rules about rules are arbitrary, then we're just doing what we complain about.
Haven't seen the CNN video but it was his stunts at the Capitol I see most places saying it was the video where he harassed a CNN reporter for ~10 minutes streaming it on Periscope.
> Ironically, it was the initial CNN story—or rather, Jones' unhinged response to it—that proved his eventual undoing. On Wednesday, just before Dorsey was set to testify at his second congressional hearing of the day, Jones approached Darcy as he waited in line with media colleagues to be let into the hearing room. Jones, flanked by his entourage, cornered Darcy, jabbed a phone in his face, and harassed the reporter for more than 10 minutes about his work, his employer, and his looks, saying he has the "eyes of a rat." The entire ordeal streamed on Periscope, which is owned by Twitter.
There's no upside in being transparent in what is bannable. They don't want to encourage people to post what is barely allowed. Inevitably, there is going to be some inconstancy in the way borderline cases are handled, and then everyone will get even angrier.
I imagine the videos where he harasses the CNN reporter and the females protesting Kavanaugh were the last straw. This was from his Periscope live stream.
Yes. Jones and Trump both subscribe to the philosophy of "there's no such thing as bad publicity...all publicity is good publicity." Jones was overjoyed when Clinton referenced him publicly in her campaign.
He didn't even call for any harassment of these alleged "crisis actors" let alone call for their murder. If you are going to blame mass shootings on ungrounded speculation then we've got to censor half of the internet.
Your line of reasoning is no different from blaming video games for mass shootings.
People know video games are fictional, and the worlds they portray aren't real. Alex Jones, meanwhile, doesn't present himself as a fictional character, rather he convinces people that what he says is true, and the world he describes is the real world, so he's more of a charlatan or demagogue. One doesn't have to directly and explicitly call for harassment to be responsible for having inspired it.
Since the "abuse" in abusive behavior online is not defined as physical abuse, but rather mental, e.g. harrassment, I don't see how there could be any room for doubt that this horrific, insane lie is abusive to the many people affected.
The Periscope video was the last straw. Jones was angry and ranting, because that journalist had claimed that his campaigning/efforts lead to Jones' ban on social networks.
> Important to note that tech platforms did not enforce their own rules and take action against Alex Jones / InfoWars on their own accord.
> It took media outlets to point out for weeks that InfoWars was skirting the rules on these tech platforms for them to enforce own standards.
Previous offenses include: "dehumanizing trans people". That looks very bad on paper, so you search for the video, and you see him discussing an over-the-top drag queen reading a book for children in a public library. To me, with the long nails and the thick make-up and the wig, the drag queen really looks demonic/ridiculous/freaky and he remarks on that. You should have the right to call that abnormal and refuse to want to see that normalized.
Look at what happened with Pewdiepie when a media company goes on a crusade with an agenda, it is very similar.
The bottom line for this decision is not harassment or abuse, it is the political preference of Twitter's employees. Maybe it is not a good idea to have a left-leaning workforce police online debate, even if it is their platform. For all the talk about diversity, SF companies sure could do with some more political diversity.
They should have banned Alex Jones from public discourse when he had this crazy conspiracy theory that high-ranking politicians and businessmen workship Moloch and child sacrifice. They should have banned Alex Jones when had the crazy conspiracy theory that chemicals and pesticides in the water change the sex of frogs. They should have banned Alex Jones for saying that Lady Gaga turns satanism into a performance and flirts with illuminati symbology. They should have banned Alex Jones for stating that weather manipulation is still a thing after the Environmental Modification Convention.
I haven't seen evidence of this personally, so to me it's not "clear", but I also think there's a sparsity of data (these bannings are mostly few, high-profile cases). However, I absolutely do not doubt that it COULD happen, given the chance. Do you have anybody in mind that you would consider his opposite, politically, but comparable in the damaging/far-reaching nature of his rhetoric?
One example that springs to mind would be Spike Lee posting the home addresses of a couple that had nothing to do with the Zimmerman case. It wouldn't be licit even if he had the addresses correct.
And in general I see very virulent rants directed against pro-life people, with death threats and the like.
This could have happened sooner, but glad Twitter finally had the gumption to do it.
It always amazes me, the conspiracy theorists, on the right in particular.
The government is too inefficient to do anything, but can create these elaborate fictions and instantly turn into bastions of loyalty and commitment to a mission that the right can't even seem to muster.
But when you're beliefs are unfalsifiable, and you have no respect for objective truth, just perception and position, anything is possible.
What happened to the HN I once knew. Anti-censorship no matter who the individual. The fact that we have the majority of people here celebrating censorship truly scares me.
It is not just HN. That seems to be the direction the entire IT section has taken. Used to be we would respect DVD John and demand no censorship -- now all with get is that meme that free speech is exactly the same as the US admentment and that it can't be done by private parties, oh and it is not censorship if your employer is haunded down, your livelyhood ruined and everybody hates you if you say something somebody disagree with.
I see it less about the left censoring people and more about a grown man harassing a journalist by hurling abuse at his face for 10 minutes straight (whilst invading his personal space with a camera), and topping it off with a racist anti semitic dog whistle comment about his eyes. The guy being, for lack of a better word, bullied in the video took it exceptionally well.
And what this has done has motivated me to look further into who Alex Jones is, and reversed my opinion back to him being a scumbag. Seems he is only a few ratings away from going full Holocaust denial in his mission to doubt all official accounts of anything.
>this getting him banned makes him much more credible in my mind
Not to just be mean, but taken without further elaboration, this looks like petty contrarianism. It reminds me of the disturbing, poisonous following that so-called "banned" TED talks get from conspiracy-minded people based on nothing but the fact that it was banned. I'd like it if you'd elaborate more on what made you say it.
This gets me even more worried about the people that still follow him.
How can you say the words he said to that journalist and still have that big following? We have a huge information, media and education problem all over the globe, because similar things are happening in EU. Twitter just did the right thing, shutting one of the channel he had to insult, humiliate and contaminate brains of people with fake news.
Given that Jack Dorsey just testified to Congress that he considers Twitter a digital public square, does the "it's a private company" work to defend them on such matters anymore?
Of course it does. No organization private or otherwise has the obligation to provide you a platform. As far as I’m aware the government doesn’t have to provide you a platform, they just can’t deny you your right to have one of your own making or limit your access to one that they provide to others on an arbitrary basis.
Given the apparently coordinated action taken by Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and YouTube (Google), it doesn't seem to be independent, private companies acting independently.
It may not be a violation of the First Amendment, but it could be bumping up against antitrust law. Taken together, these companies have a significant near-monopoly in content distribution.
It's more like the power company or the gas company cutting you off because they don't like your politics. Yes, technically you can use a generator or get propane delivered, but the question is whether they should be legally allowed to cut you off.
If they are truly a public square and common carrier, then these platforms need to permit all content that does not violate the law.
In the eyeball economy there seems to be no way I can personally reward Twitter for good behavior. I’d like to send them $100 for banning the creep.
If I feel Apple is doing well with social responsibility I can buy more Apple stuff. I certainly won’t click more ads on Twitter to reward them. So what incentive do they really have to foster good behavior?
I can't speak for others, and I'm not convinced this is a Russian 'psyop'.
That said, I'm subscribed to the Qanon subreddit and spent quite a bit of time looking into it, and I can't see the whole phenomenon as anything other than bafflingly insane.
It's like someone took the worst conspiracy theories, the worst of evangelical-ish paranoia, quite a bit of legitimate discontent with the status quo, and let it metastasize.
As such, I downvote pro-Q comments because as far as I'm concerned they're noise on the level of climate-change deniers, flat-earthers, and vaccine-causes-autism level comments.
EDIT: that said, I curious enough about the whole thing to hear a good argument as to why Qanon should be taken seriously. But privately, by email.
Have you noticed that if someone disagrees with a Qanon claim the followers ask, “What evidence is there that my claim is false?”
But if someone makes a claim contrary to Qanon orthodoxy, the followers ask, “What evidence is there that your claim is true?”
You can’t have it both ways.
You can’t make claims and expect people to prove that you’re wrong when they don’t believe you, then turn around and expect them to prove that they’re right when you don’t believe them.
Alex Jones is free to express his speech on his own website as much as he pleases. "Free Speech" is not about forcing a company to host content they don't like. That would be against Twitter's freedoms. Alex Jones will still be heard by his audience.
maybe you haven’t noticed, but people have been going after hosting companies and payment processors lately to shut down people they find politically disagreeable. we are increasingly less and less free to host our own speech.
Every bit of it is done under the assumption that "freedom of speech only applies to the government", which is quite technically true. However, I don't really see how it would have been possible for the authors of the Constitution (since Twitter is a US company, and Alex Jones is a US citizen, it's within scope) to foresee that the greatest danger to freedom of speech would not be the government.
Honestly, we're probably at the point in our existence as a nation where we have the least freedom of speech. Sure, you can sit in a private conversion and say pretty much whatever you want. But, if you speak anywhere where the public can see it (even via private means), and you have an unpopular opinion, you have droves of people who try to shut you down. And it's not bad enough that they can get your access to your platform of choice revoked, some of these people will make it their life's mission to ensure that you lose your job or even worse become unemployable.
Look at what happened to Conor Daly after something his father said ten years prior to Conor's birth surfaced.
I'm waiting for the day when someone legitimately tries to argue that the rights of all of those descended from the Pilgrims should be taken away, since they took away the rights and land of Native Americans.
> Honestly, we're probably at the point in our existence as a nation where we have the least freedom of speech
I think McCarthyism would like to have a word with you.
People have always been persecuted socially for socially unacceptable beliefs. If you said "I want to eat babies" 100 years ago, your friends wouldn't associate with you, just as they wouldn't now.
100 years ago you could say "I think people of the same gender as me are attractive" or "I wanna do it in the butt" and also be persecuted by your friends, though now both of those phrases are unlikely to see you condemned.
You can say more total things today without being persecuted I posit, however social persecution has been made into a far more public affair with the advent of social media and the 24/7 for-profit news cycle.
I think your speech is more free, but we hear more stories of social consequences due to the nature of news and social media, which creates biases and persecution complexes.
I admit I don't have numbers and facts to back it up, but neither do you have any evidence for your argument.
Today, it seems we're approaching (if we're not already in) McCarthyism II. Except instead of being a top down thing, it's community-perpetrated. How many others have been silenced from major platforms that people don't know about because they're not as (in)famous as Alex Jones? I don't know, and I'd wager (a small amount) that you don't either.
The effects of that persecution are completely different. Sure, in the past you were more likely to be physically attacked for certain socially unacceptable beliefs. But nowadays, you're more likely to suffer long-term damage if you speak too controversially without taking great pains to hide your real identity, and even if you do the people who you anger with your speech may attempt to dox you anyway.
It's funny (in the sad way) that there are so many people of all types who will use certain "weasel" tactics themselves, but when their opponents use the same tactics, they scream "that's wrong, that's unfair, that's dirty". Almost like "the ends don't justify the means" has been perverted into "the ends justify the means only towards my opponents but never towards me".
I don't have evidence, no. But that's because this is a casual discussion for me.
hate speech and racism absolutely are political, they are only outside of the overton window. i despise racists as much as anyone but i don’t trust anyone with the authority to police permissible opinions, and i think anybody who does is naive and short-sighted. if you construct these frameworks for suppression, they will be used against you by your enemies the second they have the opportunity.
Hate speech is a phony political category. Hate Christians and white people? Well that's just fine. Have a Twitter account that retweets verified people saying 'kill all whites'? That'll get you banned.
hate speech and racism absolutely are political, they are only outside of the overton window. i despise racists as much as anyone but i don’t trust anyone with the authority to police permissible opinions, and i think anybody who does is naive and short-sighted. if you construct these frameworks for suppression, they will be used against you by your enemies the second they have the opportunity.
I hate how Xi Jinping is running China so strictly. The Russian Apartment Bombings was an inside job. Westerners should have no business in the Middle East.
That's like saying: Alex Jones is free to grow his own food on his land as much as he pleases. This supermarket has a policy not to sell food to people who violate our terms of service regarding hate speech.
The supermarket is free to not sell to any particular person on the basis that they constantly engage in hate speech.
It gets murkier when they start banning classes of people or ban someone for something that puts them in a protected class, but any supermarket that banned Alex Jones for hate speech would be well within their rights.
Ok, let's take it one step further. All the supermarkets in town decide not to sell food to Alex Jones, essentially condemning him to starvation. Are you still good with that?
If you go into a supermarket and start spewing hate-speech, yes they have every right to ban you.
If you make other customers uncomfortable, they have every right to expel you.
Alex Jones is spewing hate-speech on twitter, making other twitter users feel unwelcome, and so on.
I don't see how this analogy is favorable to him at all. If you're abusive in a space to the point of causing mental pain to others, yes, you should be removed from it.
Current audience. What about a new young audience? What about the part of the audience that wants to listen to him on Twitter?
> That would be against Twitter's freedoms.
I think you should be able to fire your users for being assholes. But I do realize the slippery slope here. I could discriminate on race, political preference, smell, weight, sexuality, age, etc. and that causes me to label someone an asshole.
Now Twitter, the biggest public and digital town square of our future, labels you an asshole, but does not specify exactly why. The global media town crier goes around town telling everyone you are now the new village idiot. Even if you vehemently agree with their decision, this should give you pause: How could such a system be hacked by adversaries/what vulnerabilities are exposed? How much unchecked social/tribal power is held in the hands of the few? What would such a system look like if it is artificially/clumsily converged to a majority opinion ideology chamber? Then, will you still be heard by your audience if you have a dissenting/unpopular/asshole opinion? Not too long ago "homosexuality is not a mental disorder" was an unpopular opinion. Do you trust our current evolution enough to say: "We are there. We can now freeze our morals and views."
I completely agree with you. I'm just saying that it must be a hard decision because they've previously chosen what to censor in the past giving them a censorship bias. We now know twitter is not a place of free speech but a place with the slant of X.
Jack Dorsey frequently said in the hearing that he wanted Twitter to be like a "public square" or "public forum". In fact he used the word "public" quite a bit, which is weird if you don't want to be regulated.
This is wrong. Is Twitter suppressing Jones' ability to say what he wants to? No. So they are not suppressing free speech. Twitter is banning a serial harasser from using their (privately owned) platform.
The analogy would be kicking someone out of your house for harassing your other guests.
Furthermore, Jones is a symptom. Banning him does cure the true problem. Does banning the likes of Jones make the MSM any more trustable? Or the MSM any more responsible? That seems unlikely.
I can’t see anything that says it’s all about free speech. I can see this though. “Freedom of expression means little if voices are silenced because people are afraid to speak up. We do not tolerate behavior that harasses, intimidates, or uses fear to silence another person’s voice. If you see something on Twitter that violates these rules, please report it to us.“
Twitter is "about" advertising; everything else is incidental. Bans only happen if Twitter believes that doing so (a) gains users or (b) prevents users from leaving.
Hate speech, election meddling, threats of nuclear war - it all gets a free pass until it stops generating "impressions".
But they only do it because we (as a group) let them get away with it. If 30% of Twitter users left, the platform wouldn't last a week.
How are they suppressing free speech? They’re not the government, they get to control their service just like any business, because they are also free.
This is a narrow view of the reality of speech in the US. Almost all public speech goes through private entities that are controlled by a small number of powerful connected people, giving them the de facto ability to censor speech.
No, one gained notoriety by making incredible food. Incidentally, he was also an abusive asshole boss, but that was not how he made his fame. Eventually Gordon was so famous for his skills that people would volunteer to be abused by him on TV just to stand near his light.
The other is just a liar, blowhard, asshole. Alex Jones has never done anything else of note besides the aforementioned.
> Crossfire, Alex Jones and Gordon Ramsay need their own shouting as a service platform.
Jones already has one, but the problem is, not enough people listen to it. So he wants to get on everybody else's shouting platforms as well. He could make more shouting platforms, but... well, "a platform for Alex Jones and Alex Jones wannabes to shout at you" isn't really much of a compelling MVP.
Does anyone still actually think that Alex Jones isn't a character or persona being put on by an actor, like Colbert's Colbert Report character? Not that this excuses anything he says or does of course (though apparently what he said here wasn't a big deal at all)... but how anyone can think Jones acts the way he does on-camera after the cameras are turned off and nobody is looking is beyond me. His lawyer essentially admitted as much in court!
Does it matter? His viewers see him as genuine and believe the things he says. When people watched Colbert, most of them got the joke because it was clearly satire. Jones hiding behind 'its a character' is such a flimsy and useless excuse.
Unlike Colbert, there's some controversy surrounding the status of Alex Jones as a performance artist. In a recent custody hearing, his lawyer argued that he was indeed playing a character. But in a broadcast on his podcast, he was quoted as saying "“We’re the most bona fide, hardcore, real McCoy thing there is, and everybody knows it and we’re delivering the goods... I’m the opposite of some scripted person.”
I think there's overwhelming evidence to support Alex Jones as a true conspiracy theorist. Whether he truly holds all the ludicrous beliefs that he consistently espouses, that's harder to tell.
Are you serious, have you ever run into one of his listeners?
If anybody listens to him thinking it's not real, they are a tiny and insignificant minority. What his lawyer admits in court means nothing to his audience.
"The Rule of Goats applies. Slightly paraphrased — for this family newspaper — the rule states: If you kiss a goat, even if you say you're doing it ironically, you're still a goat-kisser. Alex Jones, playing a character or not, is a goat-kisser."
From Ken White, notorious free speech attorney who blogs as Popehat:
