Alex Jones eats shit from Twitter

Author: Imabench

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drafterman
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@Mopac
Well, do you have a problem with him having his own platform?
Nope. He does have his own platform.

What if all the social media people use starts to block anything linking to that platform?
Then hopefully he'll become irrelevant and disappear into the ether.

What about e-mail? Do you think that e-mail should be cleansed of those not worthy to have a platform?
E-mail isn't a platform.

A private business owns the e-mail service, do they have a right to censor private communications? 
If the users have agreed to it, yes.
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@drafterman
Banning Alex Jones only adds to credibility to the idea that he is saying things they don't want you to hear. Besides that, I don't believe the accusations against him are substantiated. I think banning Alex Jones only helps his case, and will backfire on those trying to censor him.



So hypothetically speaking, what if every form of communication was monopolized by private companies, and they all agreed with eachother to censor and limit free speech. Wouldn't this be a way of getting around something pesky like the 1st amendment without actually abolishing it?
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@Mopac
Banning Alex Jones only adds to credibility to the idea that he is saying things they don't want you to hear.
Ok, and?

Besides that, I don't believe the accusations against him are substantiated. I think banning Alex Jones only helps his case, and will backfire on those trying to censor him.
What case?

So hypothetically speaking, what if every form of communication was monopolized by private companies, and they all agreed with eachother to censor and limit free speech.
This is such an impossible and alien scenario that it would require the existence of a world so fundamentally different from our own that I lack the capacity to even speculate how it would operate.

Wouldn't this be a way of getting around something pesky like the 1st amendment without actually abolishing it?
They don't need to "get around" the 1st amendment or abolish it: it doesn't apply to them in the first place.
Mopac
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@drafterman
The plausibility of this scenario is not the question.


Lets say internet inc owns the entire internet now and they decide that people are not allowed to say anything that contradicts their politics. 

You say that upholding the first amendment doesn't apply to them as a private corporation. Correct?







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@Imabench
I'm not an Alex Jones fan by any means, but Owen Shroyer was great and he was one of the lead reporters for Infowars. They actually got quite a bit of quality content out.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the DNC or something of the sort paid off Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube to ban his accounts, as he was one of the reasons Trump got so much positive publicity.

Either way, him being banned by three unrelated platforms at the exact same time is basically proof that these megacorporations have not-so-hidden political agendas that they're pushing on us.
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@Mister_Man
What we are seeing is the product of an entire cold war worth of KGB meddling coming to fruition.

It might be too late to do anything about it. People are going on facts that were fabricated by the very people who are trying to overthrow the government. It's nearly impossible to sort through it. 

They'll single out Alex Jones as being full of it while consuming and believing the news that other compulsive liars ram down their throats. A lot of these reporters on the television? Even when they are trying to deliver something straight faced you can
see them struggling to hold back laughter. They know they are lying. 



What's the big difference?


It really is the politics.

Alex Jones is on the wrong side.






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@Mopac
That's so true. It's sad seeing people extensively fact-checking people like Alex Jones and trying to find one shred of evidence that suggests what he says isn't 100% accurate in every imaginable way, but they'll take anything megacorportions like CNN say at face value.

We live in a time of "you're probably right because I have the same opinion."
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@Mopac
The plausibility of this scenario is not the question.
I'm not talking about the plausibility of the scenario. I'm saying that the world in which such a scenario exists is too alien to comprehend. It's like saying: "What if pi was 4"? It's impossible to consider.

Lets say internet inc owns the entire internet now and they decide that people are not allowed to say anything that contradicts their politics. 
Then someone else creates their own internet and we go there.

You say that upholding the first amendment doesn't apply to them as a private corporation. Correct?
No. The entire jurisprudence of United States law says that.

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@Mister_Man
Well.. at least people can train on the skills of fact finding debunking Alex Jones for the rare day they will fact find other sources.
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@Greyparrot
Do you genuinely believe the people who exhaust every avenue fact-checking Alex Jones will spend more than five seconds looking up a Washington Post opinion piece to "fact check" what CNN says?

:laughing:

The truth is sad my friend
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@drafterman
Far fetched maybe for a free country, but I don't believe as implausible as you might think. Especially if the alternate internet is illegal.

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@Mopac
Far fetched maybe for a free country, but I don't believe as implausible as you might think. Especially if the alternate internet is illegal.
But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the actions of corporations, not governments. Speaking of which, a monopoly on the Internet would itself be illegal.
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@drafterman
Well, lets hope that the US doesn't go along with the UN if it decides to regulate speech on the internet in order to comply with a standard consensus of what is acceptable based on the inputs of countries with less liberal attitudes of what constitutes legal expression.
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@Mopac
What does that have to do with Alex Jones and Twitter?

17 days later

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@Imabench
Alex Jones is insane, but I don't feel good about this. These technology giants have far too much control over our consumption of information. This time it was just Twitter and a couple other social media platforms. But what if Google decides to filter Alex Jones out of its search results? What if all the ISPs get together and decide to take Alex Jones off the internet? What if all that starts happening to people who aren't Alex Jones? I support regulating the technology giants as public utilities, forcing them to respect free speech in the same way that the government has to.
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You aren't entitled to climb into someones property to speak your mind dammit.  You can innocently climb in to request their permission and that's about it. Alex Jones can still cunduct as many psychotic episodes as he wants.  Evidently, being able to speak publicly on the internet without having to encounter Alex Jones contributes to a valuable service.  If you don't value it, choose another service or make your own.  

This is not a free speech issue.  It's a civil rights issue fyi, so be careful conservatives that you don't contradict a lack of support for laws that guard against the effects of segregation.  Alex Jones is at worst being banned, on the basis of political orientation to cater advertisers after the rich leftist snowflake market.


13 days later

Castin
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I read six more families of Sandy Hook survivors sued him this year. Plus an FBI agent.
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@Mister_Man
You don't need Alex you can pretend your conspiracies into existence all on your own.

7 days later

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@Imabench
Is Alex Jones "more dangerous" than people who tell cancer patients to stop buying their medicine and instead, send the money to them as a demonstration of faith?



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As crazy as Alex Jones is, this ban was for Dorsey to cover his ass in a way the other social media "platforms" did not with their "hate speech" reasoning. Big issue, there is no such thing as hate speech legally. As platforms they can remove content that breaks the law, not something that doesn't. 

They've been skirting a line with certain content under the agreement this kind of stuff is no bueno. This is just one of many overreaches from these companies where they are operating as publishers and not platforms. 

This has nothing to do with the 1st amendment, and has everything to do with defamation law. Social media platforms are exempt from such tort, but beyond the illegal are supposed to not moderate content. Defamation suits(like the lawsuits filed by Sandy Hook families of survivors against Jones, are thus handled individual to individual. 

But independent of Jones, actions like shadowbanning, withholding verification(checkmarks and the like), and more of conservative content is fmpov going to lead to their exemption being revoked and these companies being opened up to defamation tort for the content posted on their respective sites.