[Alf]

Originally Posted by Dezzy

No, he just promotes hate and the harassment of parents of murdered children.

That's not a good enough reason for big tech companies (monopolies) to have the right to silence human beings, in my opinion.

If they can do it to him, they can do it to anyone, and I don't want them to be able to have that power over us.

Forget Alex Jones, it's not even about him.

[Maru]

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.

[Crimson Dynamo]

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

[Tom4784]

Originally Posted by LeatherTrumpet

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

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?

[GiRTh]

Youtube video

[Maru]

Originally Posted by GiRTh

Youtube video

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

[Oliver_W]

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.