No, they are a private company who can restrict usage to whomever fails to follow their terms & conditions that users agreed to when they signed up. Just like every other platform owned by a private company that this arsehole has been banned from.

Trying to turn it into an argument of freedom of speech is just disingenuous, he broke the rules of the website and services and he got banned from them.

Nobody is denying him his freedom of speech, he is allowed his opinions but he isn't entitled to use these platforms when he breaks their rules.

Do you agree with their rules?

Hypothetical question for

If one of these companies hired a person with a totally different political opinion to you, and they saw that you called somebody a Nazi or some other name, and they decided to kick you off the platform for hate speech basically because they didn't like you and your opinion.

Would you think, that's fair enough, rules are rules?

Or would you think that you are being treated terribly?

im afraid that was not the point made

Hate speech isn't just slurs. You could find thousands of videos in which any and all slurs are used and nothing likely would happen to those users.

Hate speech runs deeper than that, it's about spreading REAL hatred to a point it could spread into real violence, and, like how I've spoken about the parents of the Sandy Hook victims, Jones' riling up and incitement of action within his fanbase has lead to serious real life harassment and consequences for these people whose only crime has been losing a child.

Inciting hatred against a group of people for discriminatory reasons is hate speech, it isn't the same as opposing someone's views and presenting your own.

Your hyporthetical would not happen but if it did, I wouldn't be mad about it because I have the capacity to realise my mistakes. I certainly wouldn't expect left or centre media to mollycoddle me and blame the world for my errors like the right wing are doing with Jones.

Now time for my question, you're defending Jones here but what do you think of his treatment of the parents of the Sandy Hook victims?

No, the original point was silly. It doesn't matter if he broke the law or not, that's not in question. He breached the terms and conditions he agreed to when he joined those sites and services and they terminated his membership. That is the crux of it.

Trying to obfuscate the issue just to vindicate him of blame is just a revisionist take on what happened. He broke the rules, he got banned. Simple.

He also pushed the pizzagate conspiracy theory which was basically a pizza house in Washington which supposedly kept children in the basement to be raped by the clintons, podesta et al. A guy went into the restaurant with a shotgun demanding that the children be released but they didn't even have a basement. You can't incite violence and then face zero consequences.

Exactly, he's been incredibly lucky that he hasn't faced any charges considering and that the worst that's happened to him is that he has been banned from the platforms he uses.

I don't know what he's actually said about Sandy Hook. I didn't even know what Sandy Hook was up until about a year ago, when I heard it mentioned with Alex Jones. I've never looked into it, all I know is that it was a School shooting, and I think Alex Jones said that it was a hoax or something like that, is that right?

I don't know anything about his treatment of the parents, you'd have to show me some footage for me to answer that.

Wouldn't it actually be a good idea to research the person that you're defending before defending him?

Just an idea but seems like a sensible starting point to me.

It's Alex Jones. I don't think of him as a political arm of anything. He's like the "special interest" category of the non-adult video section at the local porn store. "Would you like some arousing suspicion to go with your sexual arousal?"..

Yes, he speaks to some of the right-wing crowd, but I always felt that that was more out of convenience of audience to peddle his products and conspiracies to, not necessarily because he is so political? His literal platform is to keep people riled up... that's the gist of it. There are a few that will act out on that information, but it's harmless for a vast majority of people. Usually.

While I find the ban is a little bit ambiguous and unusually strange given the amount of time it took them to detect his "hate-speech". It seems weak to cite that policy even now with how PREVALENT death threats, hate speech, fear-mongering, etc, all that is on social media.

Probably there is no real way to moderate it all, but going after big figures like Alex Jones is inevitably going to look terrible because automatically it's going to be seen as those providers being "threatened" by not him, but his base. And at best, they've probably now authenticated him with his fans. They've given him the largest notch one can have in that field: He's now too legit for the mainstream... So here he's going to grow a long beard now, get behind his mic and talk about "muh platform" and use it to fund his own "exclusive" service by his own means. They may have potentially made him bigger. I wouldn't be surprised if he got even whackier after this...

It is weird how they finally ban him after all this time, but I don't feel very much sympathy for him or for these companies. It's probably more of a PR thing at this point because as the other more ballsier companies starting doing it, the others follow suit. FB's stock recently took a major hit due to their having to "tweak" things over this same controversy, so of course they banned him... all a power in numbers kind of thing, yes, but I think financially motivated more than not.

If they start banning a boatload of other folk over political views, then yes. However, a lot of these companies wouldn't dare to atm because of the backlash it'd likely cause with all the controversy out there. That's why "shadowbanning" is a now thing... which is a way to severely limit someone's reach without them knowing. i.e. a pussier form of a real ban.

From a business/publishing perspective, I don't think social media is a good bet to hedge anyway long-term for brands. If that brand is already known, then sure, that'd be extra income. However, if that's their primary means of communication with their core clientele, then that will be a problem for a lot of these outfits.

FB has it in such a way now that you have to put money into their engine in order to reach your own followers. So I don't bother with it myself. I think the business model of relying on social media to secure business is fading into the past. We can't trust them to even show our content the way we intend, so seems silly to have other loftier expectations of them, such as protecting citizen's rights... they are businesses first and foremost. Youtube has done a lot to demonetize it's biggest contributors, for one, and I don't think that's solely a political motivation.

It's better to secure your own means of livelihood as much as possible. Even if it means mirroring that content on a smaller outfit, or going exclusive. For conservatives, CRTV is one. It's never good to be underneath the thumb of a company whose arses start to itch as soon as one their contributors becomes too "edgy". Conversely, publishing under companies whose brands are perceived as "liberal"(?), when you're a right-wing outlet, and then itching about when they crack down using those supposed "left-leaning" policies is a bit asinine... in Alex Jones world, though it made perfect business sense to do so, because it gave him "thumb the nose" at authority cred... and any arguments in his favor after this ban will just propel him to newer heights. In short, he's trolling the right-wing and has been trolling them for some time now.

lets not be under any illusion

youtubes "morality" is based on money

how they can be blamed and how that hits the bottom line

hence why its so, so wrong

I'm not defending him personally. I'm defending myself and the rest of us.

a) what has BLM achieved?
b) which specific Nazi groups are you even talking about?

So you're saying the guy who almost instigated a shooting in a Pizza place and has spearheaded the harassment of the Sandy Hook parents didn't deserve to be banned?

Needs a drug test more than a ban imo. He sounds like he's on aphetamines

I didn't realise Alex Jones was so ... dodgy, haha. I thought he was just a well produced version of the loons you seen ranting into their webcam about how train windows control your dreams.

All I'd seen of him before was when he interviewed Blaire White. He was mostly asking her the usual questions (trans, right wing politics) and nothing too bad came up, until he said "so do you think that the trans movement is leading us all to be turned into robots?" Needles to say, she was pretty dumbfounded.

True Dezzy

But found this:
[Banned from multiple platforms, Infowars, on Aug. 6, turned up on Periscope (which is owned by Twitter but has its own community standards), running promotions for its mobile apps and other properties. As Digiday wrote last week, the digital ecosystem has lesser-known companies that enable sites like Infowars.

“With your help spreading it and downloading it, we are unstoppable,” read a voiceover from Jones on Periscope, referencing his apps in Apple’s and Google’s stores.

Jones also referenced Vimeo as a destination for its content. Vimeo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.]

https://digiday.com/media/platforms-...-places-shout/