Nobody wants to be in the position of defending Alex Jones. He's totally indefensible. But that is always how these things start. Once you start regulating content on the basis of factual accuracy, you put these companies in the position of making decisions about political truth, and that is an extremely dangerous thing.
These are really hard ethical questions, and I think both views are reasonable and understandable. But ultimately I think it's more dangerous to put Google in charge of regulating truth. It feels like a win in the short term to ban Alex Jones, and it is a win in the short term. But the long term consequences of things like this are really really important, and the fact that they're obscured by distance doesn't make them any less so.
This is not how it starts, it’s how it ends. Thousands, maybe millions, of accounts were banned by YouTube in the decade and a half preceding with this for harassing people, selling scams and spreading lies. It’s like the bare minimum a network can do to keep things civil.
The simple fact is that for almost no investment Alex Jones could have his own site serving just as many users per month. My guess is he probably does, and did, so the only thing he’s really missing out on is YouTube‘s free hosting, discovery and traffic and their generous ad revenue split.
Birrell and Ahmed's convictions seems to go too far, they didn't actual incite violence or criminal activity and I think that's an important line. Is 'I hope they die' reasonably interpretable as incitement to kill? I'd say no, but is it hate speech? I'd have to say yes so from a legalistic point of view the prosecutions may have been legitimate. The concept of hate speech is a slippery slope though.
On the Satanic Islam case, the guy was acquitted on all charges so I don't think that supports your argument.
Anyway thank you for your last comment. I agree some of these cases went too far, but that doesn't mean we're some kind of oppressive police state. Neither of the two people convicted in these cases deserve any sympathy, in a broader moral sense they deserved everything they got, but at the cost of an erosion of our civil liberty protections at the margins that I hope we don't come to regret.
Ya I don't want to make it out to be more than it is. It's certainly not an oppressive police state. But is it chilling speech a bit at the margin? I'm not sure that the answer is yes, but i'm also not sure that the answer is no, and that is concerning to me.
"My GF thinks this pug is the cutest thing ever, so I'm going to make it the least cute thing in history - a Nazi"
And then trained it to react to things like "Gas the Jews" and "Sieg Heil". This is not at all a central example of speech inciting violence.
Funnily enough, Nazi Germany also tried to prosecute someone for training a dog to salute when Hitler was mentioned [0] - apparently that was disrespectful.
How was he inciting violence? He trained a pug to do a nazi salute as a way to make it less likeable to his girlfriend(or at least, that is the set-up to the video). A prerequisite for the joke is that "gas the Jews" is an abominable thing to say, and that the Nazi salute is as far away from "cute pug" as you can come.
Hate speech involves intent. Here he used "gas the jews" as a means to project intent on a pug to make a cute pug Nazi. The joke is that a cute pug is a Nazi, and the joke would not work if that wasn't considered that a bad thing. The point of the video is "Nazi = bad".
Robert Watts said this about the draft during the Vietnam war:
> They always holler at us to get an education. And now I have already received my draft classification as 1—A and I have got to report for my physical this Monday coming. I am not going. If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.
L.B.J. meaning president Lyndon B. Johnson. Watts did this in front of a crowd while miming aiming with a rifle. The crowd applauded him.
SCOTUS ruled it legal under the first amendment.[1] I agree with their decision and I wish more countries had such stringent protections for freedom of expression.
> Nobody wants to be in the position of defending Alex Jones.
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." - H.L. Mencken
I agree that's how these things start. Now doctors in the field and epidemiologists are being censored on YouTube for having unorthodox views on COVID-19.
These are really hard ethical questions, and I think both views are reasonable and understandable. But ultimately I think it's more dangerous to put Google in charge of regulating truth. It feels like a win in the short term to ban Alex Jones, and it is a win in the short term. But the long term consequences of things like this are really really important, and the fact that they're obscured by distance doesn't make them any less so.