I've said it before and I'll keep on saying it: The original formulations of freedom of speech weren't about protecting the rights of the speaker or writer. They were about protecting the rights of those who wanted to listen or read. Every time you ban a document or silence a speaker, you are also preventing people from reading what they want to read or hearing what they want to hear. That harm is far greater than whatever happens to the author.
Again, YouTube is a private company and they can do whatever they want when it comes to curating the information they store. I would be against any law that compelled them to host information that they didn't want to host. But in the long run, I think their current policy is extremely counterproductive. Imagine if YouTube existed 30 years ago. Would they have banned atheist views? Would they have banned videos critical of Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal? What about videos endorsing transgender ideas? Many views that were considered crazy at that time are now acceptable today. Suppressing heterodox views means that fewer are exposed to them and moral progress is impeded. Yes, most fringe ideas are bullshit, but every once in a while we stumble onto a diamond: Slavery is wrong. Men and women should have the same rights. Homosexuals should have the same rights as heterosexuals. Etc. These were all extremely controversial ideas when they first came into the public sphere. Earlier versions of our society suppressed them as dangerous misinformation.
So far, we haven't figured out a way to separate good ideas from bad ones besides exposing people to them and seeing which memes reproduce in the population. In other words: If you ban people like Alex Jones, you also ban people who are activists for causes that society will adopt in the future. And we all end up worse off.
There are certainly views that we hold today that future generations will condemn us for. Better that we discover them sooner rather than later.
These are really hard ethical questions, and I think both views are reasonable and understandable. But ultimately I think it's more dangerous to put Google in charge of regulating truth. It feels like a win in the short term to ban Alex Jones, and it is a win in the short term. But the long term consequences of things like this are really really important, and the fact that they're obscured by distance doesn't make them any less so.
The simple fact is that for almost no investment Alex Jones could have his own site serving just as many users per month. My guess is he probably does, and did, so the only thing he’s really missing out on is YouTube‘s free hosting, discovery and traffic and their generous ad revenue split.
There is no automatism. In many countries hate speech is forbidden, without them devolving into a dictatorship.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/stephen-birrell-s-convic...
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-19883828
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/sep/03/satanic-isla...
This is just a small selection. Obviously the UK has not "devolved into a dictatorship", but it is clearly censoring non-violent political speech.
On the Satanic Islam case, the guy was acquitted on all charges so I don't think that supports your argument.
Anyway thank you for your last comment. I agree some of these cases went too far, but that doesn't mean we're some kind of oppressive police state. Neither of the two people convicted in these cases deserve any sympathy, in a broader moral sense they deserved everything they got, but at the cost of an erosion of our civil liberty protections at the margins that I hope we don't come to regret.
And then trained it to react to things like "Gas the Jews" and "Sieg Heil". This is not at all a central example of speech inciting violence.
Funnily enough, Nazi Germany also tried to prosecute someone for training a dog to salute when Hitler was mentioned [0] - apparently that was disrespectful.
Hate speech involves intent. Here he used "gas the jews" as a means to project intent on a pug to make a cute pug Nazi. The joke is that a cute pug is a Nazi, and the joke would not work if that wasn't considered that a bad thing. The point of the video is "Nazi = bad".
Jesus, what a brain dead ruling.
I don't think there was any intent for a Pug to start a new holocaust.
This is non-violent political speech?
> They always holler at us to get an education. And now I have already received my draft classification as 1—A and I have got to report for my physical this Monday coming. I am not going. If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.
L.B.J. meaning president Lyndon B. Johnson. Watts did this in front of a crowd while miming aiming with a rifle. The crowd applauded him.
SCOTUS ruled it legal under the first amendment.[1] I agree with their decision and I wish more countries had such stringent protections for freedom of expression.
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." - H.L. Mencken
There are people who we don't know about who are currently having their views suppressed. A few of them probably hold views that future societies will endorse. But because they don't have a voice, it will take longer to make moral progress. Compared to that, Alex Jones is a rounding error.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219427
I will not support any legislation that needlessly endangers individuals. Society needs to protect people. You don’t need everyone to go through a tragedy before a society is illegitimate, just anyone.
I can’t speak for the latter three threads, but I was active in the first one, arguing the same position.
You just identified society as corporation and corporation is dictatorship.
He didn't got booted by society and collective ostracism but by a business decision. That's a corporation making decision for the peoole which information the society should be exposed to.
If the society is not resistant to stupid ideas and need to rely on corporations and politicians to police information, that's a malfunctioning society.
Also, ToS are not society rules.
You’ll be surprised, then, when the answer to your question is “yes”.
But it would become a problem if it turned into violent action or the statements would be more targeted and specific.
(and I give a 50% chance of that person with the sticker being a techie themselves)
The "breaking of norms", from your comment.
Is this a genuine question? This is HN, so it should be. However, I’m not sure how you can be this far down into this chain and not know about Sandy Hook, since it is the very incident that pushed him over the line.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_s...
I’m not trying to make some gotcha argument that you can cause your followers to make death threats and therefore you had no part. I’m making the case that Alex Jones is an idiot who says things about water turning the frogs gay, and under no reasonable interpretation of his actions or beliefs can I see that he intended to cause death threats to occur.
Whereas Bernie immediately denounced the shooter and reached out to Steve Scalise. Steve does not blame Bernie for having a deranged fan (https://www.newsweek.com/steve-scalise-shooting-bernie-sande...). Bernie did not imply Steve deserved to be harassed or shot. He has, in fact, asked his supporters to back off (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/bernie-s...).
These two things are obviously not equivalent.
It's still the case that he changed his attitude too late, only after some of his listeners acted and the escalation became real.
This is an interesting point, because had he done that it could be used against him as an admission of guilt.
Incredulity is not an argument, nor does the link you provided have any information on Alex Jones threatening anyone's life.
Well he recently threatened to eat his neighbours!
"I'm ready to hang them up and gut em and skin em and chop them up"
This is "a murderer has not granted others the right to not be killed, so why should we not just hang him right here and now?", make no mistake.
Do you think Alex Jones should not have been talking about Epstein having a pedophile island, or promote a study by MIT about the effect of groundwater pollution on animals?
Media companies selectively choosing what to publish has been the norm since forever.
My local paper won't publish libellous comments I may write against a particular person whom I hold grudge against. And my local TV station wouldn't show a pornographic commercial that I thought would be hilarious to see.
Private media companies ultimately answer to their advertisers and most of them simply don't want to be associated with inflammatory or socially unacceptable content.
So my point still stands that the norm is for media companies to be able to curate their content as they see fit.
Even the terminology is consistent with publisher - channel, subscriber, and so on.
If the content is explicitly uploaded to YT, then how is it not a publisher?
The monetization aspect seems to be the only differentiation between what would consist a virtual library and a publisher.
And we know how difficult it is to get monetized on YouTube and make it a viable source of income.
would your paper do that it would become a likely target of defamation. Youtube claims to be a platform and is exempt from that risk.
When long-term under-informed people mumble over insane issues on a macro scale, sometimes a barrier should be summoned to simply get their point of view on record. Once you get to see their insanity, you can begin to sanitize back to common sense. imho
I don't know about you, but I'd like to decide for myself what media I can consume.
Not necessarily related to Alex Jones (I am not informed about what happened with him), but I would like to mention that YouTube in the US need not to be politically biased toward content curation, otherwise it becomes possible to sue them directly for defamation based on videos the users upload.
That to say that they can do whatever they want, but currently they are promising not to act with political motivations in mind, so a possible venue of criticism is claiming that they are not upholding this promise.
(again, I have no idea of how this relates to Alex Jones, this is only to mention that it is not only about a freedom of speech issue when it comes to online platforms)
edit: also, not sure if you lived through the 90s. But none of the examples you gave were off-limits for TV or radio.
> Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they to a discreet and judicious Reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate.
Thomas Paine's introduction to The Age of Reason[2]:
> You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.
Chapter 2 of Mill's On Liberty[3]:
> But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
None of these argue from the rights of the speaker or writer. They're focused on the ideas and the reader. They point out that even bad ideas have good uses. These are the arguments that moved us away from a censorious society.
1. https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/areopagitica/...
- "[Milton] Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties" (Areopagitica)
- "[Wikipedia] Freedom of speech and expression, therefore, may not be recognized as being absolute...Justifications for such include the harm principle, proposed by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, which suggests that: 'the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.'"
I'm happy to defer to your knowledge of Milton and Mill if you think Wikipedia misquotes/decontextualizes the latter. That said, the reason why I prefer the U.S. Constitution as a starting point isn't just because of YouTube's location or because – as an American – that it's my default frame of reference. I prefer the First Amendment because unlike writings from Mill and Milton, it has actually been implemented as law in a successful government and society. You can dismiss the Constitution as a flawed document written by a bunch of connected white guys, but the fact is that – through original intent and living interpretation by the Supreme Court – it has weathered a far, far greater scope of human communication and freedom than Milton or Mill could ever imagine.
Putting aside personal preference, what's the justification for giving pre-Constitution philosophers greater or equal weight to the Constitution? Because they thought about things decades/centuries earlier? How were their thoughts proven in implementation, not just in their own time, but in all the epochs of societal and technological change since then?
1) If some idea is true, I'd like to be able to learn that it's true.
2) If a system silences a dissenter, then other dissenters (who could have better arguments) will know that there's no principled protection for them, and won't speak.
3) If some idea has been silenced, then most people don't know the best arguments for it, so they can't in good conscience support the silencing.
4) Clearly false ideas don't need silencing. Historically, an alarming proportion of silenced ideas have been true, but dangerous to the prevailing power of the day.
5) Stopping a political idea from being heard by people is removing political agency from these people, which is undemocratic.
That's a bold and simple claim about complex interactions. Can you support this position at all or is it more like a conviction you have?
Are you saying that Alex Jones's views are just ahead of their time and the culture is not ready for it?
I understand that there is one perspective on free speech that says any restriction means that in the future people will abuse it to suppress ANY ideas they disagree with, and I find that this is only true with a very specific type of religious, authoritarian, American, republican voice.
The entire western world bans holocaust denial, and it hasn't led to a chilling effect on other expressions.
Truth is truth. No matter how much some people try to redefine it to be meaningless today, there are still some essential facts. Humanity did go to the moon. The earth is not flat.
Debatable. Banning holocaust denial is one of the greatest travesties in Western free speech. You just gave anti-Semites one more reason to believe there’s a global Jewish conspiracy going on and another recruitment tool.
The laws shouldn't have such weirds corner cases of completely banning references to one thing and ignoring another, arguably worse thing.
Because it hides the truth. Perhaps someone will discover people you wouldn't expect involved doing things we wouldn't expect which may cause some aspects from being denied to cease to be true. Silencing one groups end up silencing another.
Why don't we have a law banning denial of other genocides like the Armenian genocide. There should be an equal concern for all genocides being denied.
No. In fact I thought I explained that pretty clearly. I said, "So far, we haven't figured out a way to separate good ideas from bad ones besides exposing people to them and seeing which memes reproduce in the population. In other words: If you ban people like Alex Jones, you also ban people who are activists for causes that society will adopt in the future. And we all end up worse off." I don't know how you can interpret that to mean that I am somehow in favor of Jones.
> The entire western world bans holocaust denial, and it hasn't led to a chilling effect on other expressions.
That's not true. For example: David Irving's version of the Goebbels diaries is considered by many (including the late Christopher Hitchens) to be an important work. Irving was imprisoned in Austria for holocaust denial because of something he said 17 years earlier.[1] Apparently the statue of limitations is a long time when it comes to words. There are quite a few other examples, not to mention the chilling effect such laws have. There are also tiny annoyances such as Germany banning the swastika in Wolfenstein games and on models of Zeppelins. Is Germany's society so fragile that a symbol can topple it? They seem to think so.
These laws have a cost. Maybe they're worth it. Maybe they're not. But don't pretend they're pure upside. Many countries have no laws about holocaust denial and get along just fine. Personally, I prefer places and platforms where I can decide for myself what I'm allowed to read and hear.
So someone got convicted for holocaust denial because they denied the existence of the holocaust? The system works!
Not being facetious, this is not a problem.
> If you ban people like Alex Jones, you also ban people who are activists for causes that society will adopt in the future. And we all end up worse off." I don't know how you can interpret that to mean that I am somehow in favor of Jones.
Easily because that's the implication of your statement. That there is no way to differentiate between Alex Jones's ideology and the ideology of human rights activists.
Which is a ridiculous premise.
Some part of the heterodox ideas of today will invariably be Orthodox in the future. A small fraction of them, mind you, but you impede progress if you enforce the orthodoxy. That's what the church used to do when it had sufficient power.
I noticed that one of the videos removed by YouTube is medcram #71. Which discusses, logically and with citations, treatment results using zinc and hydroxychloroquinine. Surely because the media are quick to paint it as Trump's widely discredited treatment that he was pushing. However, if you dig into the actual studies, they don't support that conclusion, in my opinion. The media jumped on one Veterans study where the treatment was given too late in the disease to make a difference. They never reevaluated their conclusion when other studies contradicted that result, possibly because they badly want Trump to be wrong. So here is one heterodox idea being suppressed potentially to the detriment of all mankind, in our hour of need. Even if you ascribe a very small probability that I'm right on this, you have to admit censorship could be doing us a great harm.
My prediction is this gets down voted to hell because the hn voting system itself not only is a way of suppressing heterodox ideas by moving them down the page and greying them out, but it leans left as well, and I had the gall to defend a thing Trump said. I can't stand Trump for the record, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.
So given that HCQ kills people in certain situations you can understand why they might be reluctant to allow non-experts to promote its use.
When payment processors close all his accounts, he can start one of those.
Remember, kids, censorship refers to the government and only the government. Stray far enough onto the wrong side of history, and society may voluntarily decide you're an asshole and show you the door. And that'll be on you.
These online services aren't small mom/pop shops that you can just replace and patronize another. They are global near-monopolies that you cannot function without.
Google isn't just my search provider - they run my email, my internet connection, my cell service, my company's cloud repository, etc... They could destroy me at the drop of a hat.
That's a bit of a straw man, no? Jones still has plenty of perfectly-functioning restaurants to visit, with quite extensive menus. If one of the biggest assholes on the internet still has a platform to spew his hate, I don't think we're in any danger of this dystopian society existing where people can be completely silenced based on the will of a few corporations.
> Google isn't just my search provider - they run my email, my internet connection, my cell service, my company's cloud repository, etc... They could destroy me at the drop of a hat.
That's a choice you've made, not a required state of being. There are plenty of other companies that provide search, email, internet service, cell service, cloud repos, etc. that are just as (if not more) functional and featureful.
> That's a choice you've made...
No, not really. Because my argument (perhaps wrongly) focused on Google, but it's still true that I have to choose a major near-monopoly corporation to do email, mobile, social media, telephone service, cloud, etc...
There are no alternatives. Have you ever tried to stand up your own email server? You can't. Google won't even relay the emails.
More fool you. Maybe you should diversify a bit.
Which is perfectly fine and acceptable
You have no alternative to any of those services?
The Daily Stormer is fairly bad as sites go "Jews Howl as Portuguese Move to Shut Down Their Citizenship Scam" typical story - and after various attempts to get rid of them all you have to do to go to the site is google them and click on the link in the wikipedia page.
About the only sites that are really kicked out of all restaurants are paedophila ones and they deserve that and more IMO.
But the community of "MAPs" is protected by social media these days. Repeat the 13-50 statistic, though, and you're out (though the likes of "kill all white people" appears to be ok).
That's a pretty soft shell you have.
Of course there are protections for certain classes of people based on their attributes or fundamentals, but society can call your bullshit out.
I don't know, I suggest you ask him here: www.infowars.com or listen to one of his 6 podcasts a week, or subscribe to his newsletter, or buy his Tubo Force tablets in his shop, or download his app, or his soundcloud, or his reddit account, or his Gab account, or his Telegram account, or on liveleak.
The fact of the matter is that Alex Jones has more ability to braodcast his speech to people around the world than any single individual who was living before 1980.
It has happened.
When Gab tried to compete with Twitter, Apple and Google banned their app.
Payment processors have banned controversial sites like Wikileaks too.
Or visit gab.ai on your Chrome browser.
Wikileaks explains the 5 different ways you can donate to them here: https://shop.wikileaks.org/donate
Including about 75 different cryptocurrencies
Oh come on there must be far more objectionable characters on the internet. Genuine terrorists and pedophiles and whatever. Or at least they would be, but they are so toxic they actually are censored by most every platform.
And no, he isn't the only one by far. He was just the notorious one to sell people the practice of content controls on platforms. Since then many content creators have either been removed or demonetized.
Nothing controversial will ever find a home on Youtube as a consequence. You will just get the most benign shit you will get on TV if trends fortify themselves.
As I said, there are enough creators demonetized because they are just controversial. Advertisers don't like that. So what are you arguing here for exactly?
Remember kids, there's no such thing as being an actual arsehole, harassing people and endangering people. It's just that they are people who strayed on "the wrong side of history". My neighbour who's kicking his cat? Not an arsehole.
Apparently my bland non-committal comment was already provocative enough to get down-voted.
I don't have an inclination to debate it further as both of your comments are peppered with descriptions (salt-of-the-earth Trump/Brexit voter, common folk...) that suggest this would unlikely be fruitful.
50% of what he says is him talking out of his ass.
> what people in the 60s used to call a somewhat similar group: Champagne socialists. For me, at least, using my conspiracy hat this is a big big victory for the dominant class, because the existent cries for stricter corporate oversee, dismantling of the lobbying system , unjust labor conditions are totally drowned in a sea of political correctness
Absolutely. That's the point. Talk a big game about tolerance and blowing the progressive dog whistles... but keep data mining the fuck out of people and racking up insane profits.
For all people who support the "marketplace of ideas" argument (which I don't, not least because there is fairly compelling research that documents why a marketplace is a bad metaphor for how ideas spread and damaging ideology takes hold) – wouldn't this be evidence that your idea is failing in said marketplace? Your comment seems to confuse a laissez-faire approach with supporting and subsidising anyone who comes along no matter how problematic their speech is.
Being anti-censorship is not the same being pro-megaphone: freedom of speech doesn't require giving everyone the widest possible audience with no restrictions.
(obligatory XKCD https://xkcd.com/1357/)
Example: David Icke may be a conspiracy theorist, but banning him is one step closer from Alex Jones towards a censorship nightmare.
The slippery slope is 10ft behind and we're cruising down at 100 mph.
Alex Jones is riling people up on conspiracy theories that actively do harm in order to make money. What happens if a private company removes him from their platform?
…
he can still post on his website?
This isn't some Orwellian nightmare.
A lot of people are trying to figure out how to balance absolute freedom with building a better collective human society.
It's messy! People are messy! And sometimes we make mistakes, even with the best of intentions, even when we make the best choice with the information we have.
It's not like they're kicking math off of YouTube. And, no, this isn't one step towards that.
Actually, a funny thing happened to me recently that is sort of in this vein. I made a simple app for tuning theory nerds, for examining how a given equal temperament approximates different whole number ratios. I couldn't link to it when posting on a Facebook group; I was told it violated Facebook community standards (I think they just completely blocked the 1mb.site domain that I hosted it on).
This is literally what Rachel Maddow did with the Russia conspiracy nonsense.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/31/alex-jones-p...
/s
*I'm Australian, so my interest in US politics is largely entertainment.
Ah, the tired old "start your own Google / Facebook / Twitter / YouTube" trope. That can't be too hard /sarc
Why is delegating (effective) censorship to Big Tech suddenly a good idea?
Kind of a big deal if you can't host that MP4 somewhere? If Google/Twitter/Facebook/etc. don't want your stuff ... chances are Amazon doesn't want to host it either. Even if you stand up your own hardware, you're at the mercy of whatever company is providing you the internet connection.
Free speech as a principle isn't about hearing stuff you like. It's about hearing stuff you don't like. That's where the tolerance part of it comes in. When you're tolerating something, it means you're putting up with it even if you don't like it.
And it's not about the law. Yeah, they can do whatever they want since they're private entities. It's about what values we choose to uphold as a society.
Free speech is not about the "right to be listened to," it's a very specific concept that means that the government cannot punish you or restrict your ability to make speech. If one person has a wildly unpopular idea, that is simply what it is: unpopular. To quote the first amendment of the United States Constitution:
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The true problem in all of this is that the right to "speak freely" is not something that was conceived thinking it would be possible to immediately transmit speech over thousands of miles to millions of people. We have so far enshrined corporations with protection and simultaneously not created any government backed properties for people to share ideas (akin to a digital public square).
If anything is a problem it's that there is no equivalent to a public square because most Internet forums are privately owned places. It would be like if the only land that people didn't own was the sidewalk to city hall.
This is total bullshit. Amazon doesn’t give a fuck about what you’re hosting on an S3 bucket as long as it’s not illegal.
Also, Amazon is not the only storage provider in the world. Serving your bullshit to the world is definitely not an impediment or limitation.
You’re making it sound like all the major corporations in the world colluded to ban fucking Alex Jones. The reality is that he is probably too incompetent to figure out that he can build his own distribution without relying on major corporations.
But he doesn’t want that. Why? Because how else could he monetize his moronic bullshit?
Alex Jones is a drunk fuck who explodes the stupidity of his base with full knowledge and awareness about it. He knows the more shit he talks the more he can leverage his base to get financial benefits.
People defend Alex Jones on the merits of free speech and they fail to realize that you can say whatever you want and still be 100% factually wrong. So anybody has the right to refuse giving a platform to that. This is not about left and right, this is literally the difference between right and wrong.
You’re claiming that free speech is about hearing things you don’t like. Do you really believe that you’re entitled to an audience just because you have a right to freely speak about anything?
They explicitly prohibit content that is "offensive".
"Offensive Content. Content that is defamatory, obscene, abusive, invasive of privacy ..."
Pretty sure he hits a few of those? So "Amazon doesn’t give a fuck" isn't quite right.
> "Offensive Content. Content that is defamatory, obscene, abusive, invasive of privacy ..."
> Pretty sure he hits a few of those?
I have a hard time reconciling your two statements.
The slippery slope argument is great when you encounter a (seemingly) insignificant step in the wrong direction.
Banning Alex Jones on platforms is simply upholding societal values, by your own account.
They could have easily said we don't allow illegal content and that would be the end of it. I would be fine with that. It would mean a jury of my peers would determine if whatever was said violated our societal values.
That's not what they said. That's not what any of them say. Instead, they very clearly state that they will determine what is and what is not allowed by their standards.
They are within their legal rights to do so ... but I am in no way in support of that. I do not want Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, etc. in charge of what we can and cannot say in public. We, as a society, should frown on that and those working in those companies should speak up during meetings when that is proposed.
> That's not what they said. That's not what any of them say. Instead, they very clearly state that they will determine what is and what is not allowed by their standards.
This is in confliect with your quoted offensive content.
Sure, they will determine what constitutes the examples of offensive content, but at least in this case you yourself agreed with it, yet you claim you don't?
Again, make the argument when they do something wrong, not when they do something objectively in line with their terms and societal norms.
I might agree with you in principle, but I don't agree with the case put forth.
He can go to alexjones.com and post whatever he wants.
I think that cries of "censorship!" from bien-pensant tech folks are largely overblown, and not only for the reasons cited in this thread. If some heterodox ideas of today truly will be part of future orthodoxies, they'll find a way - YouTube or not. A powerful concept that dies on the vine because it cannot get onto Facebook isn't a powerful concept.
Because they currently have alignment with the correct political ideology. When that changes, so will this attitude. History shows that it will eventually change. History also shows that those currently in control will erroneously believe they will forever be in control.
Think of "Youtube" as "CBS/NBC/Network of your Choice". They don't have to produce/host any content they don't want. They should be very transparent about how they choose their content (and "not going to piss off our users" is as legitimate as any other reason) but that's all the consumers are owed.
Do I want Youtube or whomever controlling things? No. Do I understand that unless you want to pass some laws dictating them a different utility status than they currently have they're going to be in control of their own platforms? Yes. Does it just so happen that I'm fine with Alex Jones being de-platformed? Yup
However, now that a strong majority of the influential communication that takes place in society is divided across perhaps 5 tech platforms, with 1 tech company controlling the ability to search for other platforms, it's hard to say getting booted off all platforms isn't functionally restricting freedom of speech.
At what point do we concede that allowing a small set of 'private companies' carte blanche over public discourse is a restriction of public freedom?
Either a site has the right to moderate its users or it doesn't.
It also strikes me as a bit disingenuous to suggest that because he can just go create his own Twitter or his own YouTube and host things there he wasn't censored. He technically could, but that doesn't change the impact of banning him from the major services. It seems as perfectly clear that they are censoring him as it is that the big tech companies conspired to do so. Again, you may argue that it is right to censor Jones - he is either a liar or crazy, but it makes no sense to argue that he wasn't censored.
I think in isolation, it would be better if Jones didn't share his opinions. But if I had to pick between realities, and in one Jones was free to spread his conspiracy theories, and in the other big companies get to decide what we can and cannot say online? Well, it's a pretty obvious choice for me.
This is not necessarily true, it is perfectly reasonable both that individual employee were simply like minded, or that given the high visibility his character they all acted quickly not to be "accused" of supporting him.
It surely looks like they conspired, and effectively it is as if they conspired to do it, but personally I believe that as a default it should not be accredited to a conspiracy (as in the dictionary meaning of hidden agreement) unless we have some direct evidence.
Especially since the possibility that individual employees were biased and like minded is much more likely and stable.
I guess I can kind of see how it is possible to believe that it was a coincidence that all companies banned him simultaneously. It's obviously overwhelmingly unlikely that it was a coincidence, but that is at least a coherent thing to believe. On the other hand, I cannot say the same for the claim that there was "no censorship".
What do you call banning people because you don't like what they have to say and want to stop them from sharing their viewpoint if not censorship?
If you want to argue that Jones should be censored, that seems like a rational and worthwhile conversation. I don't get how you can argue that he wasn't censored though.
Regarding how Facebook, Apple, Twitter, YouTube, and Spotify are different than a random phpBB forum, I think I'll just leave that one as an exercise for the reader...
"Conspiracy - an evil, unlawful, treacherous, or surreptitious plan formulated in secret by two or more persons; plot." - https://www.dictionary.com/browse/conspiracy
They should have just drawn the line at legality & calls to violence and everything else well ... deal with it. "We're a platform, not a publisher".
Naval Ravikant basically said this, on JRE.
It is clearly censorship. The fact is simply that censorship is perfectly legal for private companies to engage in. Though when a private company starts to become a monopoly people often start trying to regulate it like a public utility.
A separate argument is whether customers and partners want to support a private company which engages in behavior they dislike such as censorship. Rogan also has every right to take his business elsewhere for such reasons, if that is actually what happened.
2. If your ISP starting preventing you from viewing HN, would that be censorship or their own right? Since you have your own right to start your own ISP.
3. If I own a cake business, is it perfectly acceptable to refuse to make a cake for a gay couple? (We all know how that turned out)
You are completely right. Free speech does not mean that anyone will force you to listen to Alex Jones or any other nutjob. It means that AJ will have the right to speak and you can ignore him.
From the top of my head, let me just list a few of the poeople that were considered crazy and could not initialy find a platform to express their ideas:
Clair Patterson E. Cuyler Hammond Albert Einstein Marie Curie Sklodowska Nikola Tesla
You get my point?
If have come to the conclusion that you either get why people defend his presence as a price for many advantages or you do not. These are not the people that buy his "man-oil".
Some say the smarter ones give in, although that should not be applied on this topic in my opinion.
> Free speech doesn't mean everyone is forced to listen to that speech.
It is just a personal dislike of Alex Jones, not an elaborate thought. Not that hard to sympathize with, which makes defense against content regulation quite exhausting. But it is also a lie, since nobody was forced to listen to Alex Jones at all.
We have seen targeted harassment against Russians by mainstream media outlets. It is the same strain of reasoning, although I would put it anywhere near reason to be honest.
Sounds like people had to go around a system to get results. System that was full of holes and not bordering on orwellian or huxleyan principles.
If this is the official position of google et al, that they should be free to boot people pf their platform. Fine. They are no longer pipes. They are editors for content.
As such. The agnostic pipes defense is no longer valid.
I would like to put my army of lawyers on attack mode to sue the sh*t out of them for copyright infringement, for trafficking stolen property, facilitating crimes etc.
You serve your dish and bow you must eat it.
And stop with these "censorship" BS. Alex Jones has every right to start his own network if he wants and put anything on it. There's nothing stopping him from doing it. But there is also zero reason why another private company has to be forced to carry something they don't want to. Free speech doesn't mean everyone is forced to listen to that speech. Why not say that CBS/NBC/ABC/PBS are also "conspiring" against him too because they don't carry his show? OMG, Nickelodeon doesn't carry Alex Jones! They're censoring him!
Come on.