Jones is not, nor is anyone, owed a platform of any kind. He’s not being silenced, everyone who wants to can still find his crap. But Facebook, vimeo and others don’t have to host him if they don’t want to.
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100%, this^. Jones’ peach hasn’t been frozen, but his ability to broadcast his vile brand has been curtailed by private businesses. It should be further noted that these businesses are operating in the age of Ajit Pai’s FCC, where the internet is not considered a public utility or a public accommodation. These businesses are completely free to reject any messages that they see fit. It’s not censorship, but profits that are at play.
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Free expression on the Internet does not include the right to use someone else’s CDN or to use someone else’s platform for promotion and marketing without regard for their rules.
If you have an issue with those rules being unfair or being arbitrarily enforced on a particular platform then work to change them. If you feel that platform has a dangerous dominance over the market then call for the state to declare it a common carrier and/or monopoly (and, while you’re at it, demand that net neutrality be preserved).
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Excellent points, which illustrate the complexities of speech in our era. I am really not defending AJ in particular. Olliver Darcy of CNN made some posts taking credit for participating in what seemed like a campaign to use TOS reporting to deplatform him. That seems different than a provider just enforcing their rules.
Users of a platform who value the atmosphere its rules are supposed to encourage are well within their own free expression rights to ask for them to be enforced against a bad actor if they’re not. There’s no real organised campaign against Jones, just a critical mass of users and employees of these platforms finally realising what his victims understood long ago: that what he’s doing is unacceptable both by the sites’ terms and the those of human decency.
This morning we had a spammer on this site. The rules of the site clearly state that spam is forbidden, the regular users like those rules, and so they flagged the comments (effectively complaining to the platform owners) until the system hid and/or deleted them. The mods will probably follow up by banning the account. Right-wing trollies and their comments regularly get banned on this site as well, not because of their noxious views but because, being right-wingers, they inevitably break the one of the rules (esp. the first two).
All of which is to say that the owners of a well-run site (esp. one that favours quality of users over quantity generally understand that community input in support of the rules is an invaluable tool in moderating content. It’s a partnership that’s in line with an interactive medium, one that takes longer to kick in with large companies like Twitter or FB that cater to lowest-common-denominator users (assuming they care about keeping out bad actors in the first place).
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sometimes I wonder if part of Jones’ long term plan, or at least a helpful side effect for those in Serious Politics who egg him on, is not to legitimize his own conspiracies, but rather to de-legitimize legitimate investigations into actual criminal conspiracies. Once red yarn maps are strongly associated with bullshit, they hope all red yarn is viewed with an additional layer of suspicion, or at least “well, they didn’t believe us, why should we believe them!?!”
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I find it hard to believe that anyone could believe that conspiracy crap he peddles. But there are always people out there with different sorts of logical reasoning processes than would be considered normal among educated people.
Certainly one effect of conspiracy theories is to blanket the whole issue in random noise, and obscure actual scientific investigation.
And the ACTUAL nazis in the streets are not?
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Pretty much exactly what I was thinking…
Conspiracies are totally a thing, and these days the scum can be as brazen as they like about it.
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It is true that there was one guy with a nazi flag last year in Charlottesville. Probably some percentage of the 24 people who showed up in Washington a couple of days ago for that big rally are neo-nazis, or at least sympathizers.
That does not seem very much like Kristallnacht to me. Or the Nuremberg rally. In a country as large as the US, there are always going to be some people with the sort of personality issues that make belonging to such organizations seem attractive. I understand that it is popular these days to believe that all the hicks in flyover country are sympathetic to fascism. I think an examination of history will show that such people have a history of smashing actual fascism, and would do it again.
My personal view, which might not be popular here, is that a large, shadowy fascist conspiracy is needed as justification for AntiFa and the RevCom people to smash stuff and hit people with bike locks and feces. Without all those imagined fascists, the Antifa violence becomes just criminal antisocial behavior.
That sort of fits AJ’s profile. He probably thinks he really is bravely standing up to an evil cabal who staged 9/11 and Sandy Hook. Or maybe he is just cynically in it for the money. I have no idea.
I agree.
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First, don’t put words in my mouth, thanks. I said shit all about the mid west. I’m well aware that a variety of political beliefs exist there. I’m not blaming the hicks. I’m blaming the people in power, who encourage this sort of black and white, us and them thinking.
A dude NOT carrying a nazi flag drove his car into a crowd of people killing one. Those carrying nazi flags are not the only fascists. You’re incredibly ignorant of postwar history if you believe. that. Right wing, white supremacists are the most violent terrorist organizations. Period. With the exception of 9/11, they have killed far more people in America than anti-fascists, ELF/ALF, or Islamic terrorists. That’s indisputable. And if people are willing to think that Hitler had a few good ideas, even if he went too far, then they are clearly fascists too, even if they reject that title.
By then, it’s too late. Even a superficial survey of modern history will tell you that.
That’s… insane. The antifascists groups have been pretty quiet until recently, with this resurgence of the far right. And of course, unlike the far right, they aren’t out there actually killing people. The far right has a damn body count. I mean, I know how utterly precious private property is and all, but human life, actual people killed for daring to oppose racism, sexism, islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, etc, is a far worse crime than smashing up some starbucks windows, wearing masks, or staring down the cops.
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Nice jump in history that you’re making there, as the Pogromnacht did not happen until 1939, six years after the Nazis had taken control. Most see shades of 1933 here, and I myself see this more like 1923, when Hitler and his goons tried to take over Bavaria in the Beer Hall Putsch, and got off with a slap on the wrist. The Socialists back then had just been violently driven out of power by a combination of monarchists and fascists, and Hitler tried to exploit the weak government in Munich.
What got Hitler back into the game was that he had many wealthy backers who were willing to give him a platform. He had a newspaper and several publishers in Munich who were willing to print his propaganda on the cheap. Without that exposure, the Nazis would have had a harder time exploiting the Great Depression and the hyperinflation.
So yeah, it does rhyme with history, and it is important that a private organisation like Vimeo does not feel forced to tolerate scum like Alex Jones.
Oh, and your personal view is unpopular because it is factually wrong. Spreading lies is just not a good way to win friend here, especially since many here have gotten to know actual active Antifa members.
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