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.

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.

It's a valid question to ask. To me, it's clear that the answer is it's better not to censor. But there are, of course, plusses and minuses...

Here's my perspective.

I remember the start of the second Iraq war very clearly. Something like 70% of Americans believed, falsely, that Sadam Hussein was behind 9/11. As someone that didn't believe that, it was almost surreal. It was like everyone had gone mad. Most MSM sources were basically de-facto propaganda arms for the US govt.

On that wave of public support, we ludicrously and tragically invaded Iraq.

I think if you replay that scenario with Twitter existing, there's a very good chance you don't hit that 70% number and a pretty good chance we don't go to war.

It's simply too easy now to be exposed to alternative narratives. And the false venere of infallibility that "the news" has historically had pretty much fades away when you see reporters duking it out on equal footing with everyone else on Tiwtter.

So! I think the banning of Alex Jones is just step 1 of a plan to "fix" this problem; it's an attempt to reassert the ability to control the narrative and what the public thinks.

I know that all might sound a bit conspiracy-theory-ish, but, well, how else to interpret things like this?

https://twitter.com/chrismurphyct/status/1026580187784404994

More broadly, it's surprising to me that so many people who believe in freedom of speech, democracy, etc in their governments, are so gung-ho for autocratic, censored governening structures in the online realms.

Twitter is more important than traditional press; shouldn't it have similar protections?