Banning Alex Jones and Infowars

Banning Alex Jones and Infowars

By Binoy Kampmark
Dissident Voice
August 10, 2018

He is treated as the bogeyman of conspiracy entertainment, and
Alex Jones has become a prominent figure for advancing a host of
unsavoury views.

High on his list of incendiaries is the claim that the 2012 Sandy
Hook Elementary shooting never took place and was the work
of paid fantasists, with the victims’ parents being “crisis actors”.

“Sandy Hook,” went Jones in a January 2015 broadcast,
“is a synthetic, completely fake, with actors, in my view,
manufactured.” The parents of two children killed at the
school massacre are suing.

There are seemingly few limits to the Jones armoury of hyper-
scepticism.

But Jones has been in the business of such production for years.

Now, a campaign for banishing him from various platforms,
including Infowars, has been enacted with a degree of censorious
ferocity.

Summary bans have been made, ranging from the giants such
as Apple, Twitter, and Spotify, to Pinterest, and MailChimp.

Apple took the lead in this competitive banning binge, removing
five of the six Infowars podcasts available via iTunes this week,
including “The Alex Jones Show” and “War Room”, while Facebook
removed four Infowars pages for violating the company’s guidelines.

An Apple spokesperson explained the company’s position in a
statement:

“Apple does not tolerate hate speech, and we have clear guidelines
that creators and developers must follow to ensure we provide a
safe environment for all our users.” Accordingly, “Podcasts that
violate these guidelines are removed from our directory making
them no longer searchable or available for download or streaming.
We believe in representing a wide range of views, so long as people
are respectful to those with differing opinions.”

Spotify has also added its name to the list.

“We take reports of hate content seriously,” went a statement,
“and review any podcast episode or song that is flagged by our
community. Due to repeated violations of Spotify’s prohibited
content policies, The Alex Jones Show has lost access to the
Spotify platform.”

Who is guarding whom, and who should decide which ideas
are significantly safe, less discomforting or otherwise?

Contraries are, by definition, discomforting; the contrarian,
by definition, dangerously disruptive.

The idea of social media platforms becoming a constabulary for the
controlling of opinion – located in the vague economy of “hate” – is
ominous.

Nor have these technology mammoths articulated “a clear
standard,” as Ben Shapiro notes, “by which the conspiracy
theorist should be banned”.

Twitter prefers a different approach.

“We didn’t suspend Alex Jones or Infowars yesterday,” came
Jack Dorsey’s announcement on the medium he helped found.
“We know it’s hard for many but the reason is simple: he hasn’t
violated our rules. We’ll enforce if he does.”

For Dorsey, the role of policing Jones is not for Twitter and such
platforms, but the media proper, an estate that has been somewhat
remiss in recent years.

He did not want to take “one-off actions to make us feel good
in the short term, and adding fuel to new conspiracy theories.”

This in, and of, itself sensible view has drawn the predictable
moralising and indignation.

Aja Romano of Vox is particularly riled.

“This response is breathtakingly amoral, as well as regressive,
terrible decision-making – for Twitter, for the internet, for all
of us. It should be a moment of reckoning for everyone who uses
Twitter.”

Words do move and change worlds, and care should, at select
times, be taken, but who polices their dissemination and exchange
remains key.

Dorsey has simply diagnosed an inherent problem in the information
ecosystem about rage and counter-rage: who controls the
participants, bars or muzzles the competition, should not,
by default, fall to the giants.

For the market place of ideas to function with a fair degree
of effect, it is participants who dictate their value, oiled by
intermittent legal interventions to test the limits of free speech.

Free speech scholars have been skeptical about whether
Jones can avail himself of the First Amendment protections.

“False speech,” goes a submission by four jurists in an amicus brief
in the Brennan Gilmore case, “does not serve the public interest
the way that true speech does.”

Gilmore, a Democratic Party activist and former State Department
official was in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017 attending a violent
rally that subsequently saw the death of Heather Heyer, killed by a
car driven by James Alex Fields, Jr.

Furthermore, the jurists insist that “there is no constitutional
value in false statements of fact.”

Jones, for his part, has submitted in court papers that his
rubbishing of Gilmore (a CIA plant hired to foment disorder,
he suggested) were opinions, rather than statements of fact
while Infowars was a “freewheeling” website where “hyperbole
and diatribe reign as the preferred tools of discourse.”

The other issue in such summary bans is how they are challenged.

Tech platforms acting as righteous disciplinarians seems an odd
thing, appropriating a degree of power they simply should not
have.

And foolishly, the campaign against Jones has given him a sense
of dangerous frisson.

His information and views will not necessarily disappear so much
as migrate to other forums and mutate with aggression.

The conspiracy theorist will ride again, even as the various tech
giants bask in the ethical afterglow spurred on by anger and
undefined standards of hate.

https://dissidentvoice.org/2018/08/banning-alex-jones-and-
infowars