Posted on 08/07/2018 5:39:15 PM PDT by Behind the Blue Wall
No, I am not going to start this post with a disclaimer about how much I personally dislike Alex Jones and Infowars. No, I don't believe everything he says, anymore than I believe CNN or any other outlet, but I enjoy hearing a wide variety of perspectives. I also believe that a lot of important political activities happen behind closed doors, and I'm curious to find out as much as I can about the most important of them, and that apparently makes me a "conspiracy theorist". Further, having watched a fair amount of Alex Jones over the years, he has as good a handle on the nature of some of those activities as anyone else out there, particularly with respect to those activities that contribute to quite a bit of human suffering in the world -- unnecessary wars, corruption in government and industry, political fomenting of violence. So yeah, I AM a fan of Alex Jones, even if I don't believe in or agree with everything he says.
That said, even were I not a fan of Alex Jones, if say, for example, the same thing were to be happening to the Young Turks, I would consider this act of censorship one of the most egregious moves of the Left in recent years. First, it was obviously a coordinated politically-motivate event, not directly precipitated by anything that Jones actually did or said, but instead by pressure from the Left, the Deep State and/or the Democratic Party, particularly with the midterm elections approaching.
Second, they aren't really private companies. They all have varying levels of direct connections to the Deep State, and they all enjoy statutory protections from liability as platform not content providers as well as anti-trust laws. But even if they were completely private, their monopolistic position over the public square arguably subjects them to the restrictions of the 1st Amendment, as laid down by the SCOTUS in Marsh v. Alabama, where the court held that the First Amendment prohibited a company-owned town from excluding religious expression in the public square.
Third, the vagueness of the basis for the censorship fails to lay down a standard that can be applied in a non-discriminatory fashion. There's no legal definition of "hate speech" in the United States (thankfully), so it's a completely arbitrary and capricious standard upon which to exclude someone from a platform. We saw that made painfully obvious recently when Candace Owens tweeted the exact same words as Sarah Leong, replacing "white" with "black" or "Jewish" and instead of being hired onto the Editorial Board of the New York Times, she had her Twitter account suspended for violating their terms of service.
I know that many on the right are reluctant to get behind a push to regulate private companies, but I think the calls to regulate them as public utilities miss the point. They can stay completely private and as unregulated in every other way other way that they are currently, except that they should be prohibited from violating the free speech rights of their users, applying the same, well established and thought-out First Amendment principles that apply to government. First Amendment public square cases are rare even as applied to government; it wouldn't be a highly regulated circumstance, with tons of reports, rules, etc. In fact, I'm certain that it would take them fare more money and bureaucracy to apply these arbitrary and capricious standards of censorship than it would for them to just not do so, and restrict themselves to preventing illegal activities only, as defined by the First Amendment.
I hope that we can effectively respond to this; the idea of allowing certain voices to be virtually disappeared by the leftist-controlled technology industry is terrifying. 1984 would prove prescient, just a few decades early in the West.
You need to grasp this point. (and others)
“Finding him in some misbegotten hole in an alley somewhere does not protect his rights to speech, because if a man cannot speak on the commons, he cannot reach the public in any meaningful numbers. “
Having a known web page on the internet is not “some misbegotten hole in an alley somewhere”.
And Facebook is hardly “the commons”.
hear hear! .
I was always a bit miffed at the attitude given Jones and INFOWars but the man has hit a few diamonds but the bigger picture is that if Infowars is taken down and AJ is evaporated, how long before its you and me.
whacky as he may be, its his free speech, therefore OUR free speech at stake here.
Support INFOWARS
Hear, hear!!
We should love and support AJ if for no other reason than that if not for Infowars, Paul Joseph Watson would be toiling away in total obscurity. Everybody loves PJW; Paul revitalizes the base by bringing in support from millions of youthful followers such as my own seventy year old self.
So you won’t mind if your phone company or email provider monitors what you say and blocks anything that might offend the average Berkeley professor? They too are private companies, you know.
UPS and Fedex opening your mail and packages to make sure they approve the political implications of the contents? Any problem with that?
If you’re smart you’ll respond that all those companies have a measure of legal protection as common carriers, meaning they generally aren’t responsible for user content, and therefore they have no legal basis for censoring user content.
On the other hand, if a publisher puts out a book with illegal content such as classified information or kiddie porn, it’s presumed the publisher had pre-emptive editorial control over the content and is legally responsible.
If Facebook and Youtube and the others want to be publishers instead of common carriers, so be it, but that makes them responsible for every jot and tittle of the content on their platforms. May a horde of barracuda lawyers descend on them and strip their bones clean, for in their blind hate they have exposed an undefended flank.
I do believe that a private company should be able to serve or cater to who they want. But the lib’s have already crossed that bridge, why must a baker bakes cakes against their beliefs but Facebook and others can deny service based on politics?
Interesting what’s going on with Alex. He sure has the look of Mossad and/or CIA-backed controlled opposition.
Yet, he also woke a lot of people up and was likely helpful to Trump in 2016.
Given the latter it is a little surprising the degree to which the current admin is allowing his empire to be destroyed—unless he is indeed of that Mossad/CIA/Stratfor backing that has long been suspected.
Maybe the admin is allowing him to be deflated for the larger good of getting to reining in the totalitarian tech lords that is squeezing him and restoring our constitutional rights and free speech more freely.
But considering how far the Mueller investigation, for example, has been allowed to go, it may not be that intentional and directed a result—either in Jones’s destruction or the take-down of the totalitarian tech lords.
We have less than 90 days until the 2018 election — and Google, Facebook, etc., are becoming more brazen by the day.
How do you feel about elements of our criminal intelligence agencies creating and directing those private companies to near-monopoly status in large part in order to choke free speech?
First they came for Alex Jones...
Liberals already define themselves and themselves alone as smart, educated, rational, love.
This lets them say everyone else is guilty of hate speech and can be banned.
If it is a very moderate but dissenting opinion, we see the “quality filters” of Twitter silencing those opinions as not good enough to be heard.
It is fascism in the name of feelings.
And they’re doing it in the 90 days before the 2018 election.
Both shutting down conservatives on Twitter under the quality filter and trying to purge conservatives yet again - but in a coordinated across the board fashion - from ALL social media.
If Facebook or Twitter ban someone, that may be a one time thing. Jones was taken down EVERYWHERE. Instagram, Linkedin, Youtube, Facebook ... you’re going to tell me rivals like Google and Linkedin agreed to shut down someone? That proves it is a coordinated attack on an individual.
The time proves it is intended to influence the election.
Trump needs to hit them with suits for violations of civil rights (freedom of speech), monopolistic practices (across the board censorship and coordinated denial of services), anti-trust laws (this wouldn’t be an issue if they weren’t so big).
This isn’t race color or religion. Jones is obnoxious, they are media companies, they are judged by the message on their medium, they didn’t want his message on their medium.
No. Property rights and freedom of speech are the same thing. I have the right to decide what speech is on my property. Jones got kicked off of a handful of sites. He’s still got the whole rest of the internet.
If what I’m saying on the phone or in e-mail reflect in anyway on them it’s cause they screwed up. The companies that kicked Jones off what he was saying via their websites was reflecting on them. And they chose not to have that. In the end this is no different than a magazine not running a piece. Which we all know they have the right to do.
Facebook and youtube have ALWAYS been publishers. And yes they ARE responsible for every jot, that’s WHY they dumped Jones.
You’re really a next level conspiracy theorist if you think that Alex Jones is a CIA op. Man . . .
“Public accommodations” is the legal term you are looking for.
I take that as an intended insult.
Not really. I’ve been accused of being a conspiracy theorist myself at times, and my response is generally, “what, do you think nothing important ever happens behind closed doors?” So, when someone says Alex Jones is probably a CIA op, my first reaction is, “Hmmm . . . maybe he is”.
I don’t know, of course. But there are some clear overlaps with Stratfor—which is likely Mossad and/or CIA, and it seems more potential links as well.
I’ll toss this out to you as a start: https://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/02/19/the-growing-complexity-of-alex-jones-israeli-connections/
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