InfoWars Removed from Streaming Sites

[peterb]

BBI once again being the voice of reason. Well said.



Jones already has a website and a newsletter. He can just puts links to his programming in his newsletter, push it out to the subscribers, and easily reach everyone who wants to listen or watch.

“When the tech companies recently started pushing back on Infowars, Jones, a syndicated radio host, released a video in which he encouraged his audience to go directly to his website and sign up for its newsletter.

"So there's no way the censors can get between us," he said.

On Monday, Jones stated that "America has been sold out," and the Infowars Twitter feed declared that the moves against his company were "communist style censorship."”

https://www.npr.org/2018/08/06/63603...ies-mega-purge

[Nephrology]

Wait a minute.. Alex Jones states some idiotic crap, a third party makes threats and then Alex Jones gets banned. I'd agree with that if AJ told folks to harass others like Maxine did, so did he? Have they banned Antifa, Maxine Waters, BLM,...? I'll wager not.

Did Alex Jones swing his fist or ask other to do so? Again, if Alex Jones screamed Lets burn this sucker down, I'd be all over tossing him off of YouTube and maybe even charging him criminally. Did he?

I think Alex is a tin foil kook, but I support his ability to shout his kooky ideas all day and all night. Just as I support the right of leftist morons being able to shout their idiotic ideas all day and all night.

He is also not dragging any companies name through the mud. Just as AntiFA, BLM, Maxine aren't dragging Google or Twitter or whoevers name through the mud aside from their own.

Amazon and Apple have a right to not be associated with someone whose speech inspires people to make death threats towards the parents of murdered children.

[einherjarvalk]

I'm torn on this and have to agree with Ted Cruz's take on it, which is that Alex Jones is a kook (Cruz in particular has a beef with Jones since Jones likes to accuse Cruz's father of murdering Kennedy), but that he does have a right to say what he wants as long as he's not actively inciting violence, which, as best I can tell, he doesn't.

Unless things have changed since he offered me a job as a social media manager (I had no idea who I was interviewing with but once Alex Jones walked in and shook my hand I internally went "ooooh shit"), Jones has been in the market of peddling fear, and based on that, peddling "information" and dumb prepper bullshit. Nothing I saw in his offices suggested otherwise; lots of t-shirts and prepper stuff, but that was about it. It's what Douglas Adams would classify as "mostly harmless."

Furthermore, I do think that it's beneficial to society as a whole to let these people spew their dumb bullshit, because it makes it easy for normal people to find common ground by pointing at the nutcases and going "we can at least agree this dude's off his rocker, right?" When you suppress these sort of opinions, they don't just dissipate - they go underground. When they go underground, they go unchallenged, and they're allowed to fester and rot outside of the public eye and any criticism that might bring potential adherents back from the brink. I used to hang out on 4chan a lot in high school and college, and while it's always been a hostile, xenophobic, toxic community, it's gotten exponentially worse in recent years. Why? Because the bubble solidified, ideas ceased being challenged, and things like the incel movement were able to solidify in the absence of scrutiny and criticism.

Facebook, Apple, Google, etc. are making a huge mistake here. Booting Jones off their platform isn't going to make him disappear, it just means he and his followers are going to get more dangerous outside of the public eye until something bursts and we're all forced to bear witness to what we wanted to just pretend didn't exist.

[OnionsAndDragons]

I don't like the way this is trending.

I agree AJ is a crazy nutjob and that saying Sandy Hook was a false flag is pretty fucked up.

I don't necessarily have an issue with a platform dumping individual pieces that may be particularly likely to incite violence, or that violate a usage policy. I think there is a serious issue when those policies are vague and used to deplatform a person or organization entirely.

Some of this stuff is getting Orwellian. There are people in these organizations that actually think or label a conversation between Sam Harris and Charles Murray constitutes hate speech. Unlike them, I have listened to that conversation and it was nowhere remotely in the vicinity of what any reasonable person could construe as hate speech. If talking about data derived from scientific research can be hate speech, anything can be hate speech. That's the problem with this shit.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[ranger]

Where is that famous quote about WW2 where no one spoke when they came for the other groups and then no one was left to speak up for them...…...

[Joe in PNG]

Furthermore, I do think that it's beneficial to society as a whole to let these people spew their dumb bullshit, because it makes it easy for normal people to find common ground by pointing at the nutcases and going "we can at least agree this dude's off his rocker, right?" When you suppress these sort of opinions, they don't just dissipate - they go underground. When they go underground, they go unchallenged, and they're allowed to fester and rot outside of the public eye and any criticism that might bring potential adherents back from the brink. I used to hang out on 4chan a lot in high school and college, and while it's always been a hostile, xenophobic, toxic community, it's gotten exponentially worse in recent years. Why? Because the bubble solidified, ideas ceased being challenged, and things like the incel movement were able to solidify in the absence of scrutiny and criticism.

Facebook, Apple, Google, etc. are making a huge mistake here. Booting Jones off their platform isn't going to make him disappear, it just means he and his followers are going to get more dangerous outside of the public eye until something bursts and we're all forced to bear witness to what we wanted to just pretend didn't exist.

This. Censorship, whether by governments or via corporate deplatforming has the paradoxical effect of giving credence to the very thing one is trying to silence.
Because if they weren't right, why would They try to silence them?
You also increase the audience, because the Forbidden has always been attractive. Best to let the kooks and cranks and haters natter on.

[Nephrology]

Because if they weren't right, why would They try to silence them?

Because there is legal precedent for civil liability for crimes inspired by speech. Consider Apple and Amazon's market cap. It does not take an MBA to do the math here.

[peterb]

This. Censorship, whether by governments or via corporate deplatforming has the paradoxical effect of giving credence to the very thing one is trying to silence.
Because if they weren't right, why would They try to silence them?
You also increase the audience, because the Forbidden has always been attractive. Best to let the kooks and cranks and haters natter on.

Yeah, that effect is unavoidable.

I still have a hard time with the notion that he’s been “silenced” when a click to infowars.com will bring anybody all the Alex Jones they can stand.

We also have no data for how many other less-famous content providers get booted off these platforms every year. I suspect that all of the platforms are continually purging content they find offensive, but we don’t hear about the ones with 32 followers.

[Hambo]

Because if they weren't right, why would They try to silence them?

Because they don't like what users are doing on their platform. Just like Tom can bounce somebody from P-F for whatever reason he chooses.

No one is suppressing Jones' right to speak his mind, they're just not allowing him to use their bandwidth.

[Sensei]

Where is that famous quote about WW2 where no one spoke when they came for the other groups and then no one was left to speak up for them...…...

Ahh, yes. That was Martin Niemöller and the “they” in that quote was the government. Specifically, it was a reference to the National Socialist Party of Germany circa 1935-1945 (aka Nazi Party) killing people. I’m sure we can all see the parellel to this discussion.

Perhaps it could be modernized to start with, “First, they came for the racist idiots...”