I’ve never been a huge fan of Alex Jones. He always seemed a little unhinged to me. But who cares? He had the right to his free speech and was able to attract millions of followers to his website and as viewers of his videos. I disagree with far more people than I agree with, but that doesn’t mean I think they should be silenced.
The First Amendment means something to me. It means nothing to the corporate media conglomerates supporting the agenda of the Deep State. They will use and are using their monopoly control over media outlets to silence the opposition.
To be clear, Facebook, Spotify, YouTube, and Apple are all private companies, and legally have the right to ban any entity from their platforms, including Jones. As Marissa Lang wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle in August 2016:
As private companies, social networks are not required to adhere to the First Amendment. They set their own rules and retain the right to moderate content, routinely screening it for instances of gratuitous violence, harassment, profanity and other offensive material.
And from me:
We need an media representative platform that values freedom of expression/thought, to compete with the likes of Google/FB etc…The scale and barriers to entry would be considerable, yet, these web based entities are in many ways the equivalent of the founding fathers printing press.
And from George Orwell:
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
Nope. That ended in the 70s. Open for business, means open for business. “I don’t like your kind” went out with big bush in porn.
If the Apple wants to say that it violates their religious beliefs, let’s see that court case.
And no one finds it interesting that all three are acting in unison? Almost like they want to make sure that he doesn’t have a platform to fight back on.
I don’t like Alex Jones, but you have to realize that to about 60% of the country Rush Limbaugh looks the same and to 40% even Ben Shapiro should be off the air.
And it isn’t like this is happening in a vacuum. Look at NYS going after the NRA.
Look at Twitter.
Look at YouTube.
If you can’t have access to Youtube, podcasts, twitter and Facebook- what do you have access to?
And in the MSM lying about you and your cause and where does that leave you?
You have to buy (from them) all your media, while they get to set the agenda and put their side out there for free.
“First they came for Alex Jones, then…they came to the homes of gun owning, traditional Conservatives and we killed every last one of that Commie scum”.
That’s my feel good statement of the day; not PC, but my personal feelings at this point in my life. Too violent? Can’t help it. I’m an imperfect person.
This is the modern version of book burning.
If your political view, opinion or even your own wild fictional story is not appreciated, it simply will be expunged from the news and it’s history of ever existing will be removed forever.
How convenient can that be for those who have power and want to keep it?
I don’t have power, but I have Freedom, and I intend to hang onto it. I keep looking at all of these recent events, and I am starting to think there may be no peaceful way for all of this to work itself out. Generally, I am an optimistic person, but the lines are getting clearer all the time.
They went after Q as well, all coordinated, something like 48 news outlets all on the same day because Q’s just a “LARP” yet they want to desperately shut that down. I think between Q and Alex Jones reporting about these elites in their child trafficking activities is why there has been a sudden push from the top to silence them.
He could not, but it would be expensive to replicate the bandwidth, capacity, uptime, hacking protection, backups, sysop time, and periodic equipment replacement. Then you have the issue of being invisible to popular searches via Google, YouTube, social media likes/follows, advertiser revenue, etc.
If I invented and controlled the major internet outlets I’d probably have little time for Al Jizz, Huffy Po and all the leftists / socialist editorial biased media sources and I’d probably jettison shit like the American Communist Party and other domestic enemies actively working to undermine this nation.
So I respect their right to do that same.
It’s a lot like when the Dixie Chicks got on the wrong side of the accepted political spectrum for their musical genre, they had free speech but it came at a cost. And then suddenly they had less options for their expression.
And they used the free airwaves and the demand of ‘inclusiveness’ based on some ‘protected class’ to get their message out. The modern Progressive movement ideas don’t even have widespread support now, but you’d think they were cannon by how the MSM reports on them.
The left demanded that the rest of us lower a ladder for them to get on the boat, now they are kicking us off the boat and yanked the ladder. We’ve been Natalie Wooded.
Sure you can host your own server. Try some alternative to Twitter. Pass around VHS tapes of your videos. Blacks could have sat in the back of the bus. Women could have been heard even if they couldn’t vote.
These people were supposed to be conduits, not controllers- especially asymmetric arbiters of what is ‘is’. If they are going to be the gate keepers, they’re function, responsibilities and oversight have to change.
You can just look to Britain and Canada to see where this goes pretty quickly.
ETA: This kind of “It’s private” so my rights don’t matter crap really piss me off. My city or state can bank roll a stadium or building and not own it, but the ‘owner’ can then try to restrict my 2A rights to carry. The place was paid for by the govt, but they make them private so that all the rules and protections and oversight don’t apply to them. Facebook, by saying that they are just a ‘board’ can winnow down its costs while growing and take advantage of the the network function of growth. Then when they are at hegemony and near monopoly size, the just flip the switch and they are a full control. They built it under one rule and now run it under another. It’s like in the 3D community where a company is open source and people contribute to develop and fix the product, and then someone takes that tech private and runs in their own direction.
I think that once a social media platform gets to a point where it dominates the entire market then it needs to operate fairly across all political spectrum’s. It’s no longer “their website, their rules” when it’s the only game in town.
Exactly. That’s part of the plan…1. Label your enemy 2. Cut off all sources of support. 3.Watch him die. What bothers me is what’s going on with the NRA, and NYS. If this is sucessful, I can see NYS using this against the gun industry as a whole, Because almost all banking services come from, or end up at Wall St…They could simply pick a manfacturer out, research his banking practices, follow the money until it lands in a New York bank, threaten that bank until they agree to sever services, sit back and watch them die…If they sue, simply string them along and force them to spend more money in court. As NYS has an endless supply of money for this via the taxpayer… It’s a rotten scheme and one that just might work unless the Gov’t steps in and stops it…
The cat is out of the bag that the social media sites are nothing more than platforms to further the leftist agenda. Talking to some people I know who have kid/teenagers, their impression is that “Facebook and Twitter are for old people.” I think all of these sites have sewn the seeds of their own destruction. Just look at how Facebook had the largest single plunge in value in history a week or so ago. All these guys like Zuckerberg better enjoy it while it’s hot, because the backlash is coming “bigly”.
That purge and the stock drop is forcing them into into the time honored Progressives secret Squirrel strategic playbook of “Do something” and make sure it is full of virtue signaling.
Frankly, I think they fomented this ‘crisis’ so that the govt would step in, then they get to control it, get and get govt support.