Posted on 08/07/2018 10:09:59 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Rather than articulate a clear standard by which the conspiracy theorist could be banned, Facebook and its competitors cited vague prohibitions on ‘hate.’
OK, let's say it -- Alex Jones is a full-fledged kook.
This is a man who called Special Counsel Robert Mueller a “monster” controlling an unnamed pedophilic gang, and then added, “Politically, you’re going to get it, or I’m going to die trying, bi**h. Get ready. We’re going to bang heads.” This is a man who suggested that the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre never occurred, and then claimed that victims were “child actors.” This is a fellow who says that vaccines give your children autism, who says that a Syrian chemical-weapons attack was a “false flag,” that Stoneman Douglas survivor David Hogg was a “crisis actor,” that the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria was actually a pedophilic headquarters, and that the Chobani yogurt company had contributed to a rise in tuberculosis.
This week, he was banned from Facebook, Apple, and YouTube . . . for none of the above reasons.
Apple announced that it “does not tolerate hate speech,” and thus Jones had to go. Facebook announced that it had removed Jones’s pages for “glorifying violence, which violates our graphic violence policy, and using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants, which violates our hate speech policies.” YouTube also cited “hate speech and harassment” as the rationale for knocking down Jones’s videos.
Now, I dislike Jones more than the average human. I’ve been a longtime critic, a status that resulted in Jones personally threatening my company a few months back, calling me a “parasite” and an “atheist” while screaming, “Get behind me, Satan!” I think Jones is a disgrace, and that supposed conservatives who have embraced him and Infowars have done a serious disservice to the conservative cause.
But I’m far more concerned with social-media arbiters suddenly deciding that vague “hate speech” standards ought to govern our common spaces than I am with the daily dose of detritus distributed by this delirious dunce. Social-media giants had a choice here. If they wanted Jones gone, they could simply have defined a standard limit on the number of debunked conspiracy theories one could peddle on the site before being banned, or they could have created a standard prohibiting public threats.
Instead, they chose the most politically correct way of booting Jones: They claimed he’d violated undefined standards regarding “hate.” That’s why so many on the right are rushing to Jones’s defense — not because they like Jones or anything he stands for, but because the Left is happy to apply double standards under the rubric of “anti-hate measures.”
To see how, we only need to examine the last week of news. Sarah Jeong, the newest member of the New York Times editorial board, has tweeted dozens of times, in racist fashion, about white people. The Left defended Jeong, not on the grounds that the New York Times ought to ignore social-media mobbing, but on the grounds that people of color can’t be racist. Were Jeong white, the Left dutifully explained, she would justifiably be fired; but since she is an Asian-American graduate of Berkeley and Harvard Law School, she’s a victim of the white patriarchy, and thus fully entitled to use racist slurs to target those with less melanin in their skin. “Hate speech,” it seems, only runs one way.
And it only applies to particular viewpoints, too. Suggest that Caitlyn Jenner is a man, and you might be violating crucial social-media “hate speech” taboos; suggest that the Jews are bloodsucking demons, as Louis Farrakhan does, and the leaders of the Women’s March will still hobnob with you.
Is it any wonder, then, that conservatives don’t trust social-media hall monitors to apply their alleged rules with equal vigilance? It’s demonstrative of the echo chamber that is Silicon Valley that rather than going after Jones on some semblance of an objective standard, they went directly for the buzzwords that will be most popular among those who love Sarah Jeong.
Unfortunately, the informal implementation of left-wing “hate speech” standards will likely be only a precursor to far more devastating culture wars to come. That’s because the Left does not operate in good faith. People of rational mind agree that Jones is a never-ending font of silly garbage. But the Left won’t leave it at Jones, which is why the social-media giants didn’t craft an objective standard to apply.
Social media is simply an echo chamber for the dwindling number of left wing kooks. It will become the same medium as the main stream media if it hasn’t already.
Ping.
When they came for Alex Jones ...
Exactly. This is the liberal test case.
They want all who disagree shut down.
Oh, so if the standards are “properly defined” censorship is OK?
SCROOOOO YOU, National Review.
Yes indeed.
The intended mechanism of Free Speech is to let the Good ideas and the Bad ideas out where folks can see them and think them over.
The Bad ideas can’t implode if other folks don’t know they’re out there.
When Jones was going after the globalist Bush, the left loooved him. When he went after the globalist Obama, the left haaated him. Now, that he’s for the anti-globalist Trump, their eyes roll into the backs of their heads and it’s waaar!
The left has redefined hate just as it has redefined racism, gender, citizenship, and more. They are able to do this through their control education, pop culture, and the media - the core elements of any good propaganda machine. Only those like us who eschew those things are able to see the truth.
Fortunately there are a lot of us!
Actually they already had their test case, it was the Daily Stormer. They literally had the domain of the website seized after harassing the registrar.
I don’t like the Daily Stormer, but it was the first time they suppressed a website’s domain solely on content that didn’t violate criminal laws.
I suggest people familiarize themselves with Tor, because the day may come when FR has its domain seized and is impossible to access on regular browsers.
It’s no coincidence that the leftist tech giants are making their big censorship push of conservative speech ahead of the midterm elections. Free exchange of information that IMPLICATES THE DEEP STATE AND THEIR PUPPET SOCIAL MEDIA KING PINS is the biggest threat to their grand plan to control every aspect of our lives and our THOUGHTS.
Funny Daily Stormer should come up. I believe they are alive and well on the web and even on Twitter! Twitter probably feels they don’t influence elections.
I think Twitter plays Whack-a-mole with them. Once their accounts start gaining strength they delete it. That appears to be their MO with “Alt-right” accounts.
Hate crime laws were created to criminalize anything a normal person says or does, or doesn’t say or doesn’t do, and to set free leftists who physically assault normal people.
Alex Jones is a despicable snake-oils salesman. Despicable because his market model is based on targeting those who are truly mentally unstable. Jones knows he can rope in those who suffer from clinical paranoia or schizophrenia. He gins up bullsh*t conspiracy theories that only those who have serious mental health issue will buy into and act upon. Jones knows exactly who his audience is, and he has purposely tailored in lunatic rants for actual lunatics.
The same may be stated of Jeff Rense and Lew Rockwell; but Alex Jones is king of the con, and all the more evil for the fact that has designed his business model to make money off of the mentally ill.
This isn’t about the midterms. It’s for when they make the formal move to remove Trump from office.
Zactly...
First they came for Alex Jones...
This is why we must defend Jones,even if we don’t really want to.
Oh, it’s coming - or trying to, anyway.
Earlier today, Connecticut’s communist junior senator called for social media platforms to ‘take down’websitesthat ‘spew hate’.
Murphy, a political hack of the worst kind,praised Alex Jones being banned on YouTube, Facebook, etc. made it crystal clear that he meant conservative sites and accounts, not liberal ones.
This pipsqueak demagogue should simply dismissed as we will be hearing more and more such calls from the totalitarian left in the days and weeks to come.
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