Those episodes get great views; I enjoy them because I find his gonzo-levels of speculative fringe insanity to be entertaining and humorous.

But I get it, some folks think that all dangerous things should be regulated or banned; especially speech.

He has creative freedom until something crazy hits the media. Though given how exhausted everyone is of these battles these days, I'm not sure anything he could do would generate sufficient outrage.

When widespread outrage is measured simply by twitter likes, I feel there is no end to the outrage machine. The cost of participating is zero while the dopamine hit of lending your support to some presumed moral issue non-zero. And therein lies the problem with adjudicating moral issues through social media. There is zero cost to join in the mob and so these tempests appear to be much stronger than they actually are. If there were a tangible cost to signing on to these outrage mobs, there would be much fewer of them and it would also be a more accurate metric.

I think the real problem started in the early '10s, when mainstream journalists got lazy af and just started combing Facebook and Twitter for material rather than doing actual journalism. It started with "crowdsourced" journalism like photos and videos of actual notable events, but devolved into internet drama stuff pretty quickly.

Many people saw what was happening and started treating Twitter as a legitimate news source to try and 'scoop' the major news outlets. Once it was obvious that being on Twitter gave you an outsized voice, it attracted all sorts of bad actors.

The 2016 election really threw it into overdrive though. Part of me wonders if Trump's whole Twitter strategy is to rile up the left because most of his base is old people on Facebook or Nextdoor. The young edgelords who were already using Twitter didn't take any of it seriously because they were just using it to troll people with 4chan memes about using bleach as eyedrops anyway.

I will get downvoted for saying this. Spotify was the one who conspired with Facebook, Apple and Google to ban Alex Jones and others. So if Joe is moving off of YouTube because he doesn't like the censorship, he's not getting anything better with Spotify.

What happens if the conspiracy theorist is someone you agree with? Do we still avoid mainstreaming them?

I wanted to avoid starting a discussion about conspiracy theories which is why I qualified it as personal, but given that you're asking, I categorically reject conspiracy theories because conspiracy logic is by definition paranoid, and I don't believe any of them.

So all it takes to shortcut your "rational examination of the evidence at hand" loop is to have someone label a subject as 'a conspiracy'? That's certainly an interesting way to move through life.

No. Where did I say that? What makes me disregard a subject is if the person advocating it uses conspirational logic to make their case.

What is "conspiratorial logic?"

Humans conspire _all the time_; the whole of human history is marked by innumerable conspiracies between humans to achieve shared goals.

Believing that it's possible for humans to conspire isn't wrong, it's rational.

>What is "conspiratorial logic?"

Making claims without having evidence for it, believing that shadowy cabals of people are somehow running the world or entire organisations (actually pretty much impossible in modern times), adopting scientific language but actually not understanding how science works (anti-vaxxers, 9/11 truthers, flat earthers etc..), making extraordinary claims or rationalisations without having an extraordinary good reason to make them, generally being paranoid and framing everything as some sort of power play, believing that everyone who disagrees with them is part of some establishment or has a hidden agenda, and so on.

>Believing that it's possible for humans to conspire isn't wrong, it's rational

Conspiracy theorists don't just believe that it's possible for humans to conspire, they believe that humans conspire all the time and use it as an explanation for claims that don't hold any water. Virtually 99.9% of conspiracy theories are wrong even if one or two happen to be right by accident, so it's useless as a way of approaching the world.

So you believe the official account of everything? Authority is everything to you?

What about all those conspiracies that turn out to be true? Libor rate fixing, US tapping merkel, certain groups in media conspiring with certain political party, etc? Every war we've been involved in the last few decades have been conspiracies. Or did you forget about yellowcake?

Extreme paranoid thinking is detrimental but so is extreme naivety. Categorically rejecting conspiracy theories is as ridiculous as categorically accepting official narrative.

So do you accept everything Trump says as gospel? Should we shut down CNN/MSNBC/etc since they peddled conspiracies about Putin owning Trump?

For someone who rejects paranoia, you seem quite paranoid about conspiracies...