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In Defense of Free Speech, Not Alex Jones
There’s a quote in the movie The American President that comes to mind frequently, and did again this week in the wake of the Alex Jones mass-banning across social media platforms. The main character, President Andrew Shepard said,
America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad, ’cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say “You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country can’t just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then, you can stand up and sing about the “land of the free”.
Alex Jones is the man whose words should make your blood boil. He has put families in Sandy Hook through hell, accusing the parents who buried their babies murdered in cold blood of being crisis actors. He has tormented the family of Seth Rich, a young Democratic operative murdered in the streets of D.C. Jones is a bad actor who operates in bad faith. That doesn’t mean that we should have massive social networks silencing him, however.
Employing the principles of free speech are a bit shaky here: Facebook and YouTube are private companies; they do not owe anyone a platform. Unfortunately, there are no public alternatives, meaning banishment from these social networks is effectively silencing. Social networks do not owe anyone a platform, but they should be awfully careful about deplatforming anyone on the basis of yuckiness of their speech.
On Twitter, the Free Beacon’s Alex Griswold joked,
First they came for Infowars, and I didn’t say anything because I didn’t like Infowars.
Then they never came for me because I never accused grieving parents of murdered children of being crisis actors.
— Alex Griswold (@HashtagGriswold) August 6, 2018
But here’s the thing: They will come for you. They already have. Just this week, TPUSA’s Candace Owens was briefly suspended from Twitter, with Fox News reporting on the specifics of her suspension,
Owens’ Turning Point USA colleague Charlie Kirk tweeted earlier Sunday Owens was suspended after she copied tweets from New York Times editorial board member Sarah Jeong.
Owens swapped Jeong’s tweets using different races and religions. Jeong came under fire last week after old tweets surfaced of her lashing out against white people.
“Black people are only fit to live underground like groveling goblins. They have stopped breeding and will all go extinct soon. I enjoy being cruel to old black women,” Owens tweeted.
The Owens suspension is the perfect test case: Twitter has been employing suspensions unevenly. Owens, a conservative, was suspended for making the exact same racist tweets as the Times’ Jeong. Some racism is okay, but it depends on the target. Some offenders are okay, it depends on their political leanings.
All of this comes after Twitter basically admitting it shadow bans conservative accounts.
It’s not just Twitter, either. Dennis Prager’s organization PragerU has been battling YouTube for months,
Why would @YouTube restrict our video with Dennis Prager about heaven?
There are now 88 PragerU videos being restricted by YouTube.
Enough is enough.
Show your support by signing our petition: https://t.co/qcNmXMQ1lZ pic.twitter.com/SEmmXXkDRk
— PragerU (@prageru) August 7, 2018
We don’t have to imagine the slippery slope argument with Alex Jones and Infowars because social networks have already banned and suspended countless conservatives for mainstream views. Which is why, no matter how awful we find Alex Jones, his mass suspension from YouTube, Spotify, Facebook and likely more should fill us with concern.
Published in Journalism
Bethany,
I put a “like” on your Post, because I think it is worth talking about. But I don’t know that I agree with you, although I usually do. Alex Jones is truly a cretin. I understand the tenor of your piece. But would you say it ok if Facebook banned a Nazi for calling for the murder of Jews, blacks, or Catholics? Wouldn’t bother me. As you say, these sites are not governmental. I’m inclined to say they should be able to ban truly hateful speech.
Yep!
Bethany,
I just put this update on my post “The Strange Banning of Alex Jones“.
UPDATE:
I thought I’d further my defense of using the word ‘strange’ to describe the banning of Alex Jones. I made it clear yesterday that the simultaneous banning of Jones by multiple platforms showed evidence of a consortium to target him. Here is even more disturbing evidence of what isn’t targeted by this consortium.
Facebook Bans InfoWars, but Keeps Antifa, Louis Farrakhan
A list of left-wing sites that make Alex Jones look tame in comparison and have not been taken down, should be maintained and monitored. I stand by my original title. The extreme targeting of Jones by these major platform players has a very bad feel to it. If a Congressional hearing is necessary because of it, I say so be it. The hearings won’t produce any change in the law but they will give the mega-platforms a lot of bad publicity and that will drop their stock prices. Tit for Tat.
Regards,
Jim
Austin! “What starts here changes the world!” Though not necessarily for the better. Also the latest 3D guns were uploaded from a company here. Love this city
Alex Jones is not being censored. If you want to read, watch, and/or listen to his stuff, you can. It’s free. The podcast is downloadable to anyone with the RSS link. It’s on his own website. You can even download it with iTunes if you really want to!
A brick & mortar store has no obligation to carry every product. Similarly, Apple, Spotify, Facebook, etc, have no obligation to promote or distribute Alex Jones’ product, or to store his content on their servers. They are not public utilities.
Distribution of digital media is freakishly inexpensive. Jones will be fine.
This misses the point entirely.
Exactly so.
However, so are private Internet service providers. You are assuming the larger Internet won’t be similarly censored. Given the deal Google made with China to apply China’s censorship algorithms, I would not assume that.
I’m having mixed feelings about this. We need a national discussion.
The PBS and BBC channels were established to protect the public from being squeezed out of the privately funded broadcasting space of the three major networks. How life imitates the Onion: PBS and the BBC have come to control content with a vengeance.
It’s going to get messy out there, especially now with Europe having equal control over the Internet with the United States. Europe is not a fan of free speech. And by the way, our discussion may be academic anyway. We don’t run the Internet by ourselves anymore.
Can you elaborate? Bethany said:
Misthiocracy said it’s not effectively silencing because Jones still has other avenues to speak through (website, podcast). This does not address the issue of bias in who gets banned, but it does address whether or not banning from the major social media sites is the same thing as silencing.
There are a few separate questions here:
My answers are “Yes,” “Probably,” and “No, but the problem is somewhat exaggerated.”
I was with you until “but the problem is somewhat exaggerated”
Candice Owens and the new lady from the New York Times show that this is really a problem. Owens got suspended temporarily for highlighting the stuff twitter allows others to say with impunity.
Decently argued all around. LOVE IT.
I am on the side of letting these companies run themselves. I am sympathetic to the argument they are natural monopolies that should be subject to common carrier regulations on content, but that will stifle innovation in the long run.
My sense is that these companies’ efforts to regulate content will fail in the end. They are already struggling and the amount of content will grow massively in the future.
Sorry double post
If these digital concerns were true advocates of free speech, they would gladly allow Jones to broadcast his views so everyone would know just what a kook he is.
By censoring him however (and yes, they can as private concerns), they demonstrate the kind of authoritarian behavior they and their friends would use if they had government power.
Funny how they don’t follow their own rules against hate speech or crackpot ideas when it comes to the left . . .
Can’t argue with your analogy George, but the problem seems to be the selective banning by small groups of people who decide what someone can or can’t say, and it seems there is a bias there. We as a society have become so attached to social media, which was launched to “connect friends and family”, and grew to this mammoth thing that is influencing every aspect of our culture, and not for the good.
So far, I have been able to figure out what exactly Jones said that led to these bannings. Presumably, the offending material is on Jones’s website, but I’m not exactly itching to go wade through hours of crap to try to guess what it might have been.
FWIW, Facebook’s statement is here. Money quote:
On the one hand, this is deeply frustrating as we all know how the definition of “hate speech” and even “glorifying violence” can be stretched in partisan ways.
On the other hand, I’ve sympathy for FB not wishing to open their decision to rules-lawyering and hectoring from all parties, especially given how slippery Jones and his fans can be.
Alex Jones will seem like a clear-cut case to most people, but Facebook et al. handled it really badly.
It was a good decision handled badly. The problem is that these “private” companies are acting in concert with a single political party. They are blind to extremists on the left and so the action comes across as hostile instead of reasonable.
If Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were to announce a consortium to expunge egregious behavior on their sites and did it on a bipartisan basis the world would cheer.
The problem is that while everyone one agrees Jones is a whack-a-doodle, they find “kill all the white people” as acceptable discourse.
I agree there’s a problem and would say that Sarah Jeong is an excellent example of shifting standards based solely on identity.
I disagree with comments I’ve seen here and elsewhere that social media platforms only ban conservatives and never ban leftists.
Is it authoritarian for Ricochet to have and enforce a Code of Conduct?
Mis,
I get it that Jones will be fine. The issue has never been about Jones but the behavior of the mega-platforms. They are claiming to be unbiased. They have targeted Jones for causes far weaker than other sites that have not been taken down. An election is coming up. Endless press coverage has been expended about Russian meddling. It is doubtful that the best efforts of Russian meddling could have anything like the effect of true bias by the mega-platforms.
Regards,
Jim
Yes they should, but ultimately it is their call what to do. We can like it or hate it. If you hate it stop using their product in protest. If you can’t then accept that you will have to conform to their social rules. Their house their rules. If conservatives hate their liberal bias they can make their own better Facebook that is truly open or at least oppositly biased. They did that with Fox News. Heck you could turn Ricochet into conservative Facebook. It serves many of the same functions with respect to public conversations.
So what? Facebook is American they have every right to influence the election, so long as they dont break any laws to do so. And so far no one seem to be claiming they acted illegally. Even shadowbanning isnt illegal. The thrust here seems to be it is unfair that liberals control all these things they built. This is just like liberal whining about the Murdocs and Fox News and talk radio.
Correct. Now, it’d be an interesting question as to whether or not his web host also cut ties, but that hasn’t happened yet.
Thank you Bethany. The clever rhetorical denial of many conservatives today is too predictable. Jones is an acid-souled scoundrel. But don’t imagine that your views, my conservative friends, are held in any higher regard than Jones’ conspiracy rants by the tech powers that be.
Conservative views on climate change, education, economic regulation, income inequality, the entire gender agenda, affirmative action, abortion and those lethal tax cuts will be next in the cross hairs.
Hell, Henry Racette is going to need a Ricochet version of witness protection soon. The ACLU is now the legal arm of the SPLC, the old liberal “disagree but protect to the death” is almost unrecognized by liberals. Sure there are a few old school liberal stalwarts like Floyd Abrams, but that breed is figuratively and literally dying.
Yes, they are coming for us. And we better have more than polite intellectual logic chopping in our arsenal.
Sometimes the first shots in a siege kill the lowlife scum who are robbing the corpses outside the walls.
Doesn’t mean the siege isn’t coming.
I’m personally much more upset about Pinterest banning Infowars. Mostly because I’m just amused about the possibility of there being any overlap in the Venn diagram of Infowars nut job fans and Pinterest users.
Seriously though, I think David French has the right idea. In the NYT today he suggests that companies like Facebook and YouTube use the legal standards for libel and slander instead of the vague and potentially biased “hate speech” when deciding if accounts should be banned. Alex Jones probably qualifies for banning this way, and it avoids the dangerous problem with banning someone for their ideas.
Yep. I think it’s ironic that the line Bethany quotes from The American President (a movie I despise) was from the liberal “hero” of the movie attacking his conservative opponent. Even then it was nonsense. Liberals have been in denial for a long time about the fact that they no longer value free speech.
Seconded.
@bethanymandel: did you personally verify, or did someone you implicitly trust personally verify, that Jones actually said all the things he is alleged to have said, or are you drawing from news reports from trusted sources like the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC and the like?
I was just listening to Jones being interviewed live by Michael Savage, and says that, at least in many cases, he did not say what he is alleged to have said.
His claim is that he is a test case for the coordinated deplatforming of disfavored public figures.
It’s not “authoritarian” to have rules, it’s always how you enforce it.
I know it sometimes seems like everyone is on Facebook, or everyone is on Twitter, Youtube, and so on, but I don’t think that’s actually true. And even if everyone were on those platforms, they also consume information from a variety of other sources. Also, they only see a tiny fraction of the content those platforms.
I don’t think this controversy is worth compromising the freedom of a private entity to regulate its content (not that anyone has necessarily called for that explicitly). There has always been a social pressure to be polite, to follow certain rules of decency, and those who violate those rules have always been shut out of certain media. The ability to shut out certain voices was even stronger in the past, when there were only a few newspapers to try to get into, a handful of tv and radio stations. Potential sources of information, outlets to get messages into the public, have only expanded in recent decades. Expanded greatly. And gotten cheaper. Websites, social media, self-publishing, podcasts, good old fashioned email newsletters, and so on. It seems odd we should worry so much about private companies regulating their content, as the practical ability for individuals to be heard expands.