I don't know if he got his "day in court", and I'm not sure he deserved one since these platforms can do what they want on an individual basis.
What is dangerous is a handful of platforms dominating communication and then conspiring to censor the same person all at the same time, which is exactly what happened with Alex Jones.
Though it seems reasonable to tell an undesirable to "find your own X", it's also a sentiment that can be taken too far and could be dangerous when taken to its logical extreme. I don't think most reasonable people believe that platforms shouldn't prevent someone from shouting "fire" in a crowded room, metaphorically speaking, but it shouldn't necessarily follow that the same can be said for anything that people may not like.
I listen to Alex Jones occasionally. I don't listen to him because I believe what he says. I just think he's hilarious and I consider him to be a comedian. I can't say that anything that he says is dangerous, as ill informed or misleading some of it is. (maybe his stance on vaccines) Not everything that Alex Jones says is wrong. He is also often wrong.
That said, depending on where the Overton window lies and the climate of politics, I don't like "find your own X" because it signifies a disdain towards dissidence, and we're not far off from saying "If you disagree with the WHO, go find your own platform." That's scary, but a lot of prominent figures in the media lump in skeptics of the WHO with the likes of Alex Jones, conservatives(i.e. heretics), and anti-vaxxers. When someone says "find your own platform", that is a complete dismissal towards someone and their ideas. Coordinated efforts to expunge people from the public square isn't something to be pleased with, even when Alex Jones is the target.
Once we're told to find our own platforms, and that becomes the norm, there's nothing to stop that precedence from propagating to "find your own website" or "find your own payment processor". When these companies are all in cahoots and basically agree about everything, there's absolutely no guarantee that a company's privilege to ban users stops with people like Alex Jones. You might just do or say the wrong thing with good intention.
There's a reason why we stopped excommunicating people who have committed no crime, and coordinated efforts to censor people is effectively modern day exile. If someone is to be expunged from the public square, the argument should be "they did (insert bad thing)", not simply "they can go elsewhere". Most people who think Alex Jones deserved to be banned don't seem particularly well informed about Alex Jones, other than that he's crazy and that he'd eat his neighbors.
The challenge with giving an equal platform to bad-faith disinformation artists like Alex Jones is that it's simply not a fair fight.
Respectable news reporting organizations are bound by an obligation to research and vet their stories.
People like Alex Jones are not, and they can look 95% as slickly presented as a "real" news organization for 1% of the cost and 0% of the moral obligations. They can churn this stuff out at a rate that sources of respectable reporting cannot even begin to approach.
It's like the information equivalent of a DDOS attack, or the "Gish Gallop."
Give the Alex Joneses of the world an equal platform and the world will eventually be nothing but Alex Joneses -- whoever screams the most sensational stuff the most often is going to win.
What is dangerous is a handful of platforms dominating communication
I agree with the terribleness of this.
But I do truly believe it's less terrible than giving a platform to bad-faith creeps like Jones.
Ultimately, the answer is an educated populace with strong critical thinking skills that can do a better job of deciding for themselves. That is truly the goal.
I'll let you decide how feasible that is in the short term, the long term, or any term whatsoever.
20-30 years ago we all thought the WWW was going to be this incredible marketplace of ideas where the truth would win. What an idealistic crock of shit that was.
> Respectable news reporting organizations are bound by an obligation to research and vet their stories.
Bound by whom? Where is this obligation written? Who holds them to it? What are the consequences if they break it?
Or more to the point: what consequences have they suffered for the fact that they have already broken this obligation over and over again over the past decades?
1. The mainstream news sources have messed up lots of times. (I would argue that their success rate is very high, though)
2. The mainstream news are largely ad-supported and therefore their entire line of work is a bit of a minefield of conflicts of interest.
That said...
They are not perfect, but comparing them to a disinformation merchant like Alex Jones is an absolute farce.
Stories at "real" news organizations are vetted by multiple members of the staff. They make corrections. This cannot be said of wack jobs like Alex Jones. They are not even in the same league in terms of good-faith effort to get things right.
Bound by whom? Where is this obligation written?
Who holds them to it? What are the consequences
if they break it?
One, institutions like the NYT and WSJ bank on their reputation as purveyors of the truth and as institutions with rigorous reporting standards. They rely on that in ways that Alex Jones does not. He relies upon being shocking and edgy.
Two -- and perhaps more tangibly -- traditionally in mainstream media, reporters caught fabricating stories or otherwise being unethical essentially forfeited their careers.
You can see both of those factors at work in the story of Jayson Blair, a reporter who was caught fabricating stories for the NYT.
Yes, the NYT was duped. Embarrassingly. But the system worked. They conducted a pretty intense internal investigation to catch the guy. They caught him. They set the record straight. They admitted they screwed up. In that one instance they displayed more journalistic integrity than you'd see from Alex Jones in a lifetime.
And what happened to Jayson Blair? As I said above, his journalism career was over.
You can point out problems with "traditional" news organizations, and I'll agree with many of them, and they are still miles better than conspiracy hacks with zero journalistic scruples.
> I don't know if he got his "day in court", and I'm not sure he deserved one since these platforms can do what they want on an individual basis.
I was making a tongue-in-cheek comment about his many legal troubles, but I also think that he had extended periods on all the platforms that he's been removed from where he knew that he was violating policies and did not change his behavior.
> What is dangerous is a handful of platforms dominating communication and then conspiring to censor the same person all at the same time, which is exactly what happened with Alex Jones.
Is this what happened with Alex Jones? The wikipedia article lists a somewhat piecemeal series of bannings in 2018[1]. You can still find videos about alex jones on youtube and there are still conspiracy videos here and there[2] I don't see much evidence that Alex Jones, the person, has been exiled from the public square. He's very much still a subject of valid conversation on the platforms that banned him. I'm not sure how the same platforms I've been using to find his content can be engaged in a conspiracy to censor him.
What you can't find on youtube[3] are video from Alex Jones's own accounts. It's also hard to find videos promoting various theories and ideas that youtube considers dangerous (like covid-19 conspiracies). I don't think this is a problem. I think there are all sorts of problems with the tech ecosystem, but I do not think a public, meandering process where one organization was removed because it continually broke website standards is going to lead us to fascism.
>When someone says "find your own platform", that is a complete dismissal towards someone and their ideas.
I don't think this is true in any situation. If I'm running a fictional video site "teentube" which hosts videos about teenage life in the US, I am not censoring anyone if I refuse to host amazing, essential, gory documentaries on terrorism and current events. Saying "go find another place" is not saying "your content has no value," it's saying "this is not your place!"
In general, I agree that we could use more specialized media hosts and economic models to support them. But it's not like the current crop of media hosts (Alphabet, Facebook, etc) are dealing with fundamentally different questions than the previous crop (ABC, CBS) did in the broadcast TV era. There were no fewer conspiracy theories in the 60s, but good luck getting a tv station to broadcast your tape on one!
>When these companies are all in cahoots and basically agree about everything
I think, to the degree that payment platforms and website hosters are in cahoots, that it is because they are all members of society. That is to say they are subject to international law and the laws of their own country. Within the boundaries of "not breaking international law," I think there's a lot of diversity in terms of perspective.
Edit:
To add a summation: There's a world where people are forced out of society without the appropriate process, a world where going "elsewhere" isn't practical. I don't think we're in that world and I don't think Alex Jones is either.
What is dangerous is a handful of platforms dominating communication and then conspiring to censor the same person all at the same time, which is exactly what happened with Alex Jones.
Though it seems reasonable to tell an undesirable to "find your own X", it's also a sentiment that can be taken too far and could be dangerous when taken to its logical extreme. I don't think most reasonable people believe that platforms shouldn't prevent someone from shouting "fire" in a crowded room, metaphorically speaking, but it shouldn't necessarily follow that the same can be said for anything that people may not like.
I listen to Alex Jones occasionally. I don't listen to him because I believe what he says. I just think he's hilarious and I consider him to be a comedian. I can't say that anything that he says is dangerous, as ill informed or misleading some of it is. (maybe his stance on vaccines) Not everything that Alex Jones says is wrong. He is also often wrong.
That said, depending on where the Overton window lies and the climate of politics, I don't like "find your own X" because it signifies a disdain towards dissidence, and we're not far off from saying "If you disagree with the WHO, go find your own platform." That's scary, but a lot of prominent figures in the media lump in skeptics of the WHO with the likes of Alex Jones, conservatives(i.e. heretics), and anti-vaxxers. When someone says "find your own platform", that is a complete dismissal towards someone and their ideas. Coordinated efforts to expunge people from the public square isn't something to be pleased with, even when Alex Jones is the target.
Once we're told to find our own platforms, and that becomes the norm, there's nothing to stop that precedence from propagating to "find your own website" or "find your own payment processor". When these companies are all in cahoots and basically agree about everything, there's absolutely no guarantee that a company's privilege to ban users stops with people like Alex Jones. You might just do or say the wrong thing with good intention.
There's a reason why we stopped excommunicating people who have committed no crime, and coordinated efforts to censor people is effectively modern day exile. If someone is to be expunged from the public square, the argument should be "they did (insert bad thing)", not simply "they can go elsewhere". Most people who think Alex Jones deserved to be banned don't seem particularly well informed about Alex Jones, other than that he's crazy and that he'd eat his neighbors.