Keeping Up With The Alex Joneses And The Boundaries Of Speech
As a private business, it is entirely Apple's decision as to whether it carries Info Wars' Alex Jones' content.
I'm disgusted by that content.
But I am with First Amendment lawyer Marc Randazza on what would be a better policy -- from Apple and other companies. He writes at CNN:
Facebook and the other Silicon Valley companies may have a legal right to kick anyone off their platforms they like. But the better policy, from a libertarian perspective, is to champion free expression -- which is what Silicon Valley used to do -- before it became beholden to outrage mobs.There was a time when Silicon Valley policy ran on the same philosophical lines as the First Amendment. The internet promised to be the final incarnation of the Enlightenment -- the true Marketplace of Ideas. Advocacy of violence or criminal activity might have gotten one banned, but not simply "incorrect opinions."
In today's society, a few internet platforms dominate the public sphere -- and they are the new public square. And society is better if all opinions and ideas are allowed to flourish -- even those that might bother you.
I am old enough to remember when liberals opposed corporate dominance of the marketplace of ideas. I remember us being aghast when corporate conglomerates took over the FM radio dial. I remember us being horrified when we realized media consolidation and some corporate overlords could begin to limit viewpoints or affect decisions about what got covered in the press.
But then Silicon Valley decided to collectively put on an anti-conservative mask. Then the corporate goblins that liberals found to be so terrifying became their savior. Censorship became not only acceptable, but called for.
I wrote this in response to Randazza's piece:
Silicon Valley is now my stodgy suburban parents -- if they had enormous wealth and could use the Internet without calling me up and frying my brain.
— Amy Alkon (@amyalkon) August 7, 2018
And Randazza's exactly right on the problem with this well-intentioned censorship, explaining:
Censorship, like the guillotine, once deployed, does not stop only with its current targets. Censorship in the name of perceived social virtue is now the "new normal." And incrementally, Liberals will come to regret letting this animal out of its cage.
More on the slippery slope:
Washington sees in Silicon Valley a chance to control speech in a way never before possible under the 1st Amendment and to roll back the clock to a pre-internet age of media gatekeepers. The way to achieve this is by continually leveraging the threat of regulation. https://t.co/xHTW5HQ5M6
— Zach Weissmueller (@TheAbridgedZach) August 7, 2018
Again, it is completely Apple's decision, and the same goes for the other companies, to refuse to carry Alex Jones' content.
But there's a push as of late -- really everywhere -- to squelch speech, and I think it's really dangerous and sets us backward.
Here's The Nation, censoring a poet they recently published for coloring outside his personal cultural lines -- and the former poetry editor there (not exactly Miss Right Wing Of 1972) setting straight the tiny little censors now running the magazine:
"...Never did we apologize for a poem we published. We saw it as part of our job to provoke our readers -- a mission we took especially seriously in serving the magazine's absolute devotion to a free press."-Grace Schulman, former poetry editor, @thenation, 1971-2006 https://t.co/fp6BYRY9P7
— Amy Alkon (@amyalkon) August 6, 2018
And let's be mindful that ugly speech that's silenced doesn't go away; it just isn't out in the open where it can be openly debated and shown for what it is.
All in all, I think we're better off for knowing what Alex Jones is pushing.
Also, frankly, the way I see it, keeping him off these platforms seems likely to turn him into a martyr and to turn his fans more rabid than they already are. Trump 2020, anyone...perhaps with some rioting and death along the way?
Perhaps that sounds a bit melodramatic. But research by Jack Brehm finds that when people feel controlled they seem compelled to rebel.
And a point from @Popehat. Milo, for example, loses big by not being on Twitter, but how effective will banning Jones from platforms actually be in stopping his message from getting out? (It's not like Infowars has been shut down.)
Right. My point is that there seems to be this "THIS IS UNPRECEDENTED CENSORSHIP" argument now, whereas I think the opportunities to evade censorship are better than ever.
— QHatSecretMessages (@Popehat) August 6, 2018
I think Popehat is wrong about that.
We've seen a variety of alternative video and twitter like sites come and go, and they mostly go.
Nascent sites (bitchute, gab) are immediately tarred as alt-right sites if they have anything controversial on them.
It takes huge pockets to fund video downloads, and youtube has those big pockets AS well the ability to never earn a profit. (As of October 2016, the CEO of YT, said "There's 'No Timetable' For Profitability") http://fortune.com/2016/10/18/youtube-profits-ceo-susan-wojcicki/
YouTube's deep pockets, FB's deep pockets all make it that much harder for a nascent alternative venue to get started.
> I think the opportunities to evade censorship are better than ever.
Popehat should expand on that and he didn't so what are they?
I am also curious if Popehat feels the same way about tenure and academic freedom. We're a far cry from Galileo. Presumably, his argument, "Has there ever been a time in human history where folks with unpopular views could reach a bigger audience on their own?" along with the deep pockets funding of a thousand think tanks should make tenure and academic freedom a moot issue, and would hugely relieve the taxpayer.
So when Jones is banned by multiple channels overnight, by all "respectable channels" just to show they are respectable, I think that's a real issue.
As the CEO of Cloudflare put it, when he kicked the Daily Stormer off the net,
> “This was my decision. This is not Cloudflare’s general policy now, going forward,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told Gizmodo. “I think we have to have a conversation over what part of the infrastructure stack is right to police content.”
> Prince explained in an internal email to staffers that he doesn’t think CEOs of internet companies should be in the position of policing content on their networks—he told Gizmodo he thinks that’s a job that should ultimately be left up to law enforcement if the content violates the law—but felt pushed to act because the operators of the Daily Stormer are “assholes.”
> “I realized there was no way we were going to have that conversation with people calling us Nazis,” Prince said. “The Daily Stormer site was bragging on their bulletin boards about how Cloudflare was one of them and that is the opposite of everything we believe. That was the tipping point for me.”
> But leaving these decisions to CEOs like himself is exactly what Prince doesn’t want—and that’s why Cloudflare isn’t changing its content-neutral policy going forward. Instead, Prince wants to spark a conversation about how tech should respond to abhorrent content, and whether content should be policed by registrars, browsers, or social networks.
> “We need to have a discussion around this, with clear rules and clear frameworks. My whims and those of Jeff [Bezos] and Larry [Page] and Satya [Nadella] and Mark [Zuckerberg], that shouldn’t be what determines what should be online,” he said. “I think the people who run The Daily Stormer are abhorrent. But again I don’t think my political decisions should determine who should and shouldn’t be on the internet.”
I think Prince has a far better handle on the state of the net and where it is going than Popehat.
jerry at August 7, 2018 12:07 AM
Is this the little media weasel who Patrick writes poems about?
Crid at August 7, 2018 1:12 AM
Also, 'disgusted by that content' is an interesting blend of twitching hillbilly self-righteousness and faux-sophisticated cityfolk detachment
We're blazing new territories of hybrid rhetoric here on the computer internet!
Crid at August 7, 2018 1:17 AM
Crid, you beat me to it. But I've never written a poem on this blog, not even in blank verse.
But yes, this is media weasel I mentioned before, which inexplicably threw you into a towering rage that I dared mention someone you'd never heard of.
The definition of "media" I operate under (which probably doesn't square completely with the dictionary) wouldn't include Alex Jones (any more than it would include supermarket tabloids), but I suppose he is "media" as the dictionary defines the term. I would consider Jones and the tabloids to be more "creative fiction" writers. They're about as journalist as J.K. Rowling.
Patrick at August 7, 2018 1:48 AM
If you're a conservative, and you aren't for regulating big tech, you are wrong
https://twitter.com/willchamberlain/status/1026516676949495808
Snoopy at August 7, 2018 3:02 AM
Heng gets Facebook blocked -
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/heng-gets-facebook-blocked/
Snoopy at August 7, 2018 3:08 AM
Where is the ACLU in all of this?
Snoopy at August 7, 2018 3:13 AM
US Senator from Connecticut supports censorship -
https://twitter.com/ChrisMurphyCT/status/1026580187784404994
Snoopy at August 7, 2018 3:15 AM
No one's civil liberties are being threatened. Facebook is allowed to make whatever rules they want for their services and even be blatantly arbitrary and biased in their enforcement. They're not public property.
Patrick at August 7, 2018 4:26 AM
> No one's civil liberties are being threatened.
> Facebook is allowed to make whatever rules they
> want for their services and even be blatantly
> arbitrary and biased in their enforcement. They're
> not public property.
The law isn't that clear -
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-response-to-online-shadow-banning-1533496357
Snoopy at August 7, 2018 4:42 AM
Twitter suspends Ron Paul Institute executive’s account, one day after Big Tech blocks InfoWars
https://www.rt.com/usa/435293-twitter-suspends-libertarean-figures/
Snoopy at August 7, 2018 4:43 AM
> threw you into a
> towering rage
Your perceptions of other people are weird.
Crid at August 7, 2018 5:20 AM
Senator's in the post. See Zach's tweet. It's within that.
"Disgusted" allows me not to do a little summary of what Alex Jones thinks but to state my position on it.
Amy Alkon at August 7, 2018 5:53 AM
I don't know about that. There will always be a dying platform in need of revenue.
When "corporate conglomerates took over the FM radio dial," flailing AM stations gave non-mainstream viewpoints a voice, giving birth to a multi-million dollar talk radio phenomenon.
Facebook, Twitter, and other now-dominant social media could one day find themselves battling competition they thought they'd already vanquished. Or, they may find themselves in the position of a dying platform in need of a fresh revenue stream.
Conan the Grammarian at August 7, 2018 6:16 AM
Jerry is correct, Popehat is mistaken.
What happens when the DNS overlords decide to route Infowars website traffic to localhost? we've already seen that with actual Klan and Nazi websites essentially being banished to numeric ip address, with no name resolution. I had to google it, but it was the Daily Stormer knocked off the air.
The Memory Hole is very real, and quite interested in you.
What is necessary is a reasonable and non-discriminatory DNS providers and domain registrars. What is also necessary is to prevent your ISP from intercepting your DNS traffic and routing it to their server of choice instead of yours.
I R A Darth Aggie at August 7, 2018 7:00 AM
You're thinking single-channel. who says the new alternative channel will even use a DNS. We may soon come to look upon the Internet as being as outdated as AM radio.
There will always be a stainless steel rat in the crevices.
Conan the Grammarian at August 7, 2018 7:42 AM
Now his Pinterest page has been taken down too -
https://mashable.com/2018/08/06/infowars-pinterest-site-offline/
Snoopy at August 7, 2018 7:45 AM
The Conservative Purge continues - now Tommy Robinson is kicked off Instagram -
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/tommy-robinson-instagram-facebook-ban-alex-jones-a8480981.html
Snoopy at August 7, 2018 7:54 AM
"When "corporate conglomerates took over the FM radio dial," flailing AM stations gave non-mainstream viewpoints a voice, giving birth to a multi-million dollar talk radio phenomenon."
That isn't what happened Conan. The government stopped their regulations on presenting 'equal' viewpoints and then talk radio exploded. Without that regulation change you still wouldn't have talk radio.
Ben at August 7, 2018 8:01 AM
Twitter almost feels like communications infrastructure at this point... And it's a shame that the brilliant people who built it don't have the reverence for free speech that we'd expect them to have. And yet government involvement would be worse.
I made a tweet about SeaLion a couple weeks ago.
Strangely, there were no replies.
Crid at August 7, 2018 8:12 AM
Did someone mention the ACLU? well, frankly, they've given up on defending civil liberties, unless you're in an acceptable class of person. Emphasis mine.
https://www.weeklystandard.com/mark-hemingway/the-aclu-gives-up-on-free-speech-and-the-first-amendment
As if they're doing a bang up job on the rest of the Bill of Rights.
I R A Darth Aggie at August 7, 2018 8:37 AM
You're thinking single-channel. who says the new alternative channel will even use a DNS.
Wut? we're going back to dials??? ;-)
For giggles, I did an IPV6 dns lookup for google.com. It's value is 2607:f8b0:4004:803::200e . Without some sort of lookup table, no human will remember that.
Someone has to maintain that table, and there will have to be a reliable way of accessing that data. While a completely new and revolutionary networking stack may come into being, odds are really good that what follows will be just an iteration of the previous stack.
What will get these giants attention is if they're stripped of their safe harbor protections and they're correctly called editors and thus responsible for what's published.
Because they are acting like editors.
I R A Darth Aggie at August 7, 2018 8:50 AM
True, ending the so-called Fairness Doctrine in 1987 did indeed free talk radio hosts to espouse viewpoints without giving "equal" time to counter viewpoints. However, without AM being desperate for a new format, talk radio would not have had an outlet.
Until the '70s, FM was used mostly to simulcast the more popular AM station broadcasts or to broadcast classical music into department stores and businesses. FM offered better sound quality and the ability to broadcast in stereo, but AM radio was still the preferred radio band.
Listenership at FM stations lagged behind that of AM stations in North America until 1978. During the 1980s and 1990s, music stations abandoned AM broadcasting, as listeners preferred FM's crisper sound and stereo broadcasting. When I entered high school, the "cool" station was an AM station and, by my junior year, those radios were tuned to an FM station.
Generally, FM radio stations didn't view talk radio as a viable format since it did not utilize any of FM's advantages over AM and did not bring in young listeners. AM radio, desperate for programming, welcomed the newly liberated talk radio which did not need FM's better sound and versatility.
Conan the Grammarian at August 7, 2018 8:55 AM
We should keep in mind that in England a man is being prosecuted for a prank in which he taught is girlfriend's dog to seig-heil (sp?). A man was arrested in Thailand for calling the king a name. People are arrested in the middle east for posting a dance video or not being dressed properly. A site that seeks to document terrorism incidents keeps getting no-platformed. In Canada a Christian college is getting their law school decertified because students have to sign a chastity pledge. Christian facebook pages are shut down because they oppose gay marriage based on the bible. It isn't just Alex Jones.
Everyone has beliefs that are wrong, crazy, or bigoted. Everyone. Everyone sometimes tells a dirty or racial joke or makes a comment. We can all be put in jail or banned from twitter if this keeps up.
cc at August 7, 2018 9:16 AM
And there's also another choke point to take into account, and that is the monetary one.
Stripe and Paypal are pretty much the defacto duopolies for internet payment transactions, and they have effectively killed companies with potential to compete against the established crowdfunding site Patreon.
Cryptocurrency is still not ready for the unwashed masses. The banks are working on it now that they realized that there's profit to be made, plus it has the potential to free them from their choke points ie. Visa/Mastercard/Amex.
Sixclaws at August 7, 2018 10:49 AM
"Any voice that reminded America of her wickedness, she sought to destroy that voice. America wants to silence my voice. Jews want to silence my voice. But if you silence the Voice of Truth that shows you a mirror of yourself, how then can you change and save yourself?"
https://twitter.com/LouisFarrakhan/status/1026890367323516929
Snoopy at August 7, 2018 11:14 AM
I was entering a comment on this thread and it was like, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, and then like, after hitting submit, it said I needed to fill out the challenge entry, but I had, and I was like, :/ :\ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It wouldn't accept my challenge entry.
It devoured my comment, and it was like a really good comment.
And then I had to back up the browser and try the challenge again and add stuff to it to avoid it seeming like a duplicate to the backend, and it wasn't as good. ಠ_ಠ.
It's kind of ...
... a bummer
jerry at August 7, 2018 11:46 AM
I predict the next step will be for upstream providers to start closing the accounts of sites like Gab, and this one, which still allow conservatives to speak.
Should this happen it will be necessary to pursue anti-trust litigation to get that connectivity back. It would be nice if Attorney General Sessions could do this for us, but he seems reluctant to do anything at all these days, so perhaps that lawsuit will need someone like Peter Thiel to step in and fund it again.
But accepting the censorship is not an option. It would be the end of the US as a free country.
jdgalt at August 7, 2018 11:59 AM
And now Alex Jones has been kicked off LinkedIn
https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet/status/1026892663855960064
Sixclaws at August 7, 2018 12:08 PM
https://twitter.com/StephenHerreid/status/1026811027311271936
I R A Darth Aggie at August 7, 2018 12:38 PM
As long as they get rid of PETA, vegan, alt-left, Antifa, communist, socialist, and Lutheran blabbermouths I'm okay with it.
Otherwise ... bad idea.
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at August 7, 2018 1:04 PM
> We should keep in mind that in England a man is being prosecuted for a prank in which he taught is girlfriend's dog to seig-heil (sp?) -- cc
Actually he just released a video today, he lost his appeal, you should watch the video, what a travesty!
https://youtu.be/camlWH7pKCc
jerry at August 7, 2018 1:04 PM
I guess they are applying what they learned from their deplatforming of The Daily Stormer.
https://twitter.com/CassandraRules/status/1026909563281448960
My prediction is that the final nail on the head is him getting his credit cards revoked.
Sixclaws at August 7, 2018 1:31 PM
Instapundit has some thoughts. Emphasis mine. I'm sure Google, et al, have good lawyers who can tell them what promissory estoppel means
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/304187/
I R A Darth Aggie at August 7, 2018 1:57 PM
My prediction is that the final nail on the head is him getting his credit cards revoked.
Heh. Maybe they should do a civil forfeiture on his liquid assets.
Just in case. He might be a terrorist sponsor. Can't be too careful.
I R A Darth Aggie at August 7, 2018 2:03 PM
Stripe, Paypal and its -I can't be arsed to remember that random letter mix- offspring will do that with the funds you have stored in their services when they think you have broken their TOS.
Sixclaws at August 7, 2018 2:07 PM
Oh, I was thinking of his bank accounts, and being seized by the constabulary in the relevant locations and not those online payment markets.
I R A Darth Aggie at August 7, 2018 2:40 PM
Well, I guess that's it for him getting a decent job or making professional connections. /sarcasm
Conan the Grammarian at August 7, 2018 2:44 PM
>> well, that’s not the law, or the custom, and hasn’t been for a long time.
he's right, sites like Google and Facebook have been protected from a range of copyright,fraud, libel and defamation claims because they've posed as neutral conduits for user content. They have something like a common carrier indemnification, though they're not formally recognized as such.
What the takedown of Infowars indicates is that these platforms will no longer maintain a content neutral stance. Instead they will implement procedures and processes to actively remove content. We're seeing this already with Facebook and Twitter.
paul at August 7, 2018 2:52 PM
People always imagine the demons let loose by the Revolution won't attack them, but the Revolution always eats its own. Just ask Maximilien Robespierre, Ernst Rohm, or Leon Trotsky how that revolution thing worked out for them. Once the revolution is in power, the goal is no longer ideology, it's power.
Conan the Grammarian at August 7, 2018 2:53 PM
The Hawk.
Crid at August 8, 2018 4:57 AM
"It would be nice if Attorney General Sessions could do this for us, but he seems reluctant to do anything at all these days"
As I've said before the man is a drug worrier. Tell him google is full of crack or something. He's dumb enough to fall for it. But if drugs aren't involved Sessions doesn't care.
Ben at August 8, 2018 7:12 AM
I don't know what Alex Jones thinks and why you are disgusted by it. I don't know it because he has been censored. Confutation is always better than censorship, and now I have the suspicion that what he says is not entirely wrong.
I believed that the lesson about free speech and open debate was an assimilated lesson; there are too many cases telling me that a not little place here is played by people annoyed because they are not able to refute all of the other side's points.
Paolo Pagliaro at August 9, 2018 12:06 PM
"Twitter almost feels like communications infrastructure at this point..."
Twitter seems to have peaked at under 70 million users in the US. That is 21% of the population. If you limit things to adults you get 28%. Roughly a quarter. So roughly three quarters of Americans are showing no interest in Twitter. By comparison 89% of us use the internet. Similar percentages use grid electricity, water, and garbage services. So Twitter has a long way to go before it hits actual infrastructure scale.
As for the SeaLion thing, I'm guessing most people find it easier to just drop Twitter than to switch. As for other alternatives the economics just don't add up. Twitter is constantly losing money. They need a constant infusion of outside cash to keep operating. And they aren't getting any closer to profitability. So any competitor probably needs to be run like a charity as well. No surprise people aren't trying too hard to duplicate that business model.
Crid, you've marveled about how everyone on Twitter feels one way and then you come on here and it is a whole different world. As you can see from the numbers while Twitter is large it isn't everyone. And I'm betting it is very non-representative of the US at large. Seems to skew significantly left. I understand Twitter is your world. But it isn't the world.
Ben at August 10, 2018 10:59 PM
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