It's not an issue if you happen to agree this time.

Next time you might not. And then it's too late, you've made your bed.

That only makes sense if you consider someone like Alex Jones to be “just another person who happens to have different opinions about some things than some other people”. He never got shit from anyone for merely offering unpopular opinions, his history (and present) is much more complicated and fucked up than that. He’s definitely on a short list of people for whom humanity in general is worse off overall for having him in it. Like a negative contributor on a team who just makes work for other people, he’s a negative contributor in many, many ways for all of humanity, and not just from spreading transparent lies and obvious disinformation. He never got in trouble for simply saying something someone else disagreed with, he got in trouble for directly fucking with the lives of victims of horrible tragedies, over and over again.

What does this even mean? Are you suggesting a private company should be forced to host content they don't want to? Should Fox News be forced to host Rachael Maddow and a Huffpost show? Is Fox News "censoring" Huffpost by not hosting a show on their network?

No, none of that. This is different.

Imagine a public town square. Would you want any company acting as the gatekeeper, deciding what speech is allowed or not in that setting?

YouTube, Twitter and a few others are effectively the new town square. I don't think we want to end up in a position where a few corporations are dictating acceptable speech and open debate.

What about a private business is "public town square" and why doesn't it apply to Rachel Maddow being hosted by Fox News?

Even the Supreme Court has called social media "the modern public square".

> what for many are the principal sources for knowing current events, checking ads for employment, speaking and listening in the modern public square.

The power to ban someone from social media is the power to cut them off from society. That's too much power for any private corporation to hold.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packingham_v._North_Carolina

Just because you can apply a rule with one set of nouns and achieve an unjust outcome doesn't mean the rule is bad.

There's no daylight between "we can't restrict shitty speech because one day we might restrict non-shitty speech" and "we can't have laws against bad things because one day we might have laws against non-bad things". It's an obviously stupid argument and it's not any less stupid because the operating verb is speech.

I don't understand this attitude that we shouldn't say "don't do bad things" because someone else might come along and disagree about which things are bad.

I think you mean "don't say bad things".

First they came for Alex Jones, but I said nothing, because screw that guy.

Let's see if this goes any further. If it doesn't, there's no problem.

Nothing is set in stone. Everything is a spectrum, and fights for where to draw lines on a spectrum will continue in society in perpetuity.

You are absolutely right. Right now, it isn't an issue, because Alex Jones is a legitimately awful, possibly insane human being who contributes nothing to actual political discourse, and directs hatred at parents of murdered children for his schtick. It's Youtube, not the federal government.

And while I do believe "The Internet" is the public square, I don't think Youtube is /quite/ that protected yet, and I don't think Alex Jones deserves that protection.

Other people may get shut down like AJ did, and I may not like it, and I'll argue against it.

https://wannabewonk.com/gab-and-free-speech-on-the-internet/

tldr - AJ can set up a server at home or on AWS. He may have to do compressed audio only.

Conspire - To join or act together; combine

Censor - prohibit or restrict the use of something

Yeah, they conspired to censor.

Come on.

Verb (with object) > to agree together, especially secretly, to do something wrong, evil, or illegal.

verb (without object) > to plot (something wrong, evil, or illegal).

We all know that "conspire" has connotations beyond just to "join or act together", otherwise there would be no difference between "coporate" and "conspire".

The main difference between my definition and yours is the emotion underlying the interpretation. The base definition is the same.

Heh, got 'em. Can I interest you in some brain supplements?

We only burn the bad books!

Nobody burned anything. You can head over to his website and watch his videos if you want.

Not giving someone a platform isn't taking their free speech away, any more than me telling religious people attempting to convert me to get off my property is violating their religious rights.

if you had many videos up, and they were all taken down, it is like book burning. they were published, then destroyed.

Alex Jones said trans people murder babies with democrats for their blood...

one can be against censorship and against the message being censored.

in other words : don't assume those that defend people like Alex Jones are defending his opinions.

Many are defending his ability to transmit his message, regardless of the quality of that message, in the interest of preserving that ability for themselves and causes that they support.

Nah, they are using that as a front to push their agenda, because otherwise they'd be super in favor of google and youtube's free speech too, which they are not.

Alex Jones isn't legally prohibited from saying lies about Sandy Hook, and the people up in arms defending those hateful lies and saying we should be careful to preserve hateful lies on private platforms are either idiot patsies or purposefully misleading liars(like Alex Jones himself actually.)

I think you're confusing YouTube's "free speech" with YouTube's ability to censor anything they want. I have no issue with Google uploading YouTube videos or blog posts spreading essentially whatever message the company wants to spread.