YouTube, Apple and Facebook Ban InfoWars, Which Decries 'Mega Purge'

I know some people chafe at the thought of tech companies self-censoring their platforms but they should be allowed to prevent their platform from becoming a place decent people don't want to be. Jones isn't just an opposing viewpoint, he's a hateful lunatic. And no, that's not a slippery slope.

To preserve a tolerant society, you need to be intolerant of intolerance. And yes, that&#x27;s a paradox. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Paradox_of_tolerance" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Paradox_of_tolerance</a><p>Germany obviously has had a troubled past in this area. Another concept that may be useful: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Streitbare_Demokratie" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Streitbare_Demokratie</a>

Good. They should ban more people. They should ban whoever they feel like banning, for whatever reason or give no reason at all. They already ban you instantly if you show a nipple.<p>We should stop pretending like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter et al. are some kind of public good or utility. They are private message boards. Message boards which already decide what you see by showing you an endless stream of content designed to optimize ad revenue.

Don&#x27;t get me wrong: Alex Jones is the snake-oil-selling, kayfabing carnival barker of the internet. My concern is what appears to be a coordinated take-down of his channels on the dominant social media&#x2F;communications platforms with very few precise details explaining why. My biggest concern is that this crackdown on a crackpot will set off one of his high-functioning, mentally ill fans to pull a Timothy McVeigh type of vigilante response on one of the companies who have canned him in the last 24 hours. Is my concern unwarranted?<p>EDIT: I presume the down-votes on this comment are because I referred to some of Alex Jones&#x27; fans as mentally ill. I don&#x27;t say this lightly: I know a handful of people who are legitimately mentally ill who think Alex Jones is the lone truth-teller in the media. You should be very scared of what these people might do if they think their hero is being martyred.

Do the TOS that Jones violated have definitions of &quot;hate speech&quot;?<p>Since there is no legal definition in the US, it would seem necessary for each TOS to create its own. If they have, I&#x27;d be curious to know how much they overlap, and how specific&#x2F;vague they are.<p>EDIT: why the downvotes? I am honestly asking a question about how specific and consistent the definitions are. I didn&#x27;t realize I would be punished for doing so.

Why all of a sudden?

<i>&quot;Mega Purge!&quot; RealNews tweeted on Monday morning.</i><p>It&#x27;s too bad they couldn&#x27;t get Twitter on board.

Alex Jones got banned for telling the truth.

Today the west learns that speech can be harmful even if not directly violent.

At least we are not like China, we just censor for the good reasons.

As someone who believes in using a network of non-correlated news and information sources (much like a smart investment portfolio uses non-correlated investments to maximize risk&#x2F;reward-based returns) to give me an well-rounded view on daily news events, I think that censorship like this should be examined <i>very</i> closely.<p>I&#x27;ve enjoyed the rants of Alex Jones in the past, just like I&#x27;ve enjoyed Joe Scarborough at MSNBC, Rush Limbaugh, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, and even Art Bell, so I find this coordinated attack and take down of one of these outlets to be worrisome.<p>Are we going to accept this current meme that &quot;hate speech&quot; (whatever the hell that is currently defined as) can only come from the Right?<p>If so, I&#x27;ll pass on that idea...it&#x27;s totally political in nature if that&#x27;s the case and the last thing that I believe is helpful to the world is to have one political viewpoint, Right or Left, to totally run the show.<p>I think examples of Mr. Jones&#x27;s banning &quot;hate-speech&quot; should be required if these companies are going to revoke his 1st Amendment protections and censor him, if nothing else then to warn others where the line is to be drawn.

Interesting to note that this was removed off the front page of HN just now.

What&#x27;s interesting in all this coverage is how the actual content said wasn&#x27;t so much as alluded to beyond &quot;hate speech&quot;. Who was he hating on and how? Can we discuss hate without being hateful?

&quot;Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake&quot; - attributed to Napoleon<p>They just made Alex Jones in a sympathetic character, a martyr for free speech.<p>And now the pressure to regulate social media platforms will increase.<p>Can Alex Jones be banned from using toll roads, if those toll roads are operated by a private company?

The big three tech companies need to be broken up. Too much power in the hands of a few. Don&#x27;t like what your opponents are saying? Label them &quot;hate speech&quot;, close down their networks &amp; move on. You can&#x27;t be heard if you don&#x27;t have a voice.<p>They (the big three) should not be allowed to own our internet interactions anymore than the phone company could listen to and profit from our conversations or regulate what we talk about.

Sounds great. It delegitimizes all 3 of them in the eyes of a lot of people. ( I&#x27;ve only seen occasional clips from his videos, but he seems like your typical half crazed conspiracist, not an ISIS-level propagandist deserving damnatio memoriae)

Not an Infowars fan, but I see &quot;hate speech&quot; being used as a reason to ban alternative views a lot lately. Let&#x27;s say he was indeed engaging in hate speech (I haven&#x27;t verified this): hate speech is still speech, no?<p>Edit: thanks for the downvotes, can we not have a discussion about this? Should we ban hateful books too? I happen to have learned a lot from historically hateful books.

It takes time to get on top social network radar, but its impossible to get on three at the same time, without some sort of coordinated effort. In other words - it obvious that getting banned by FB, YT and Apple altogether within 24 hours IS coordinated; the only question: what massages are there networks trying to send ?<p>PS. I am not fan of Jones show, just like I am not fan of KKK that still existing in USA; but I do remember what Niemöller wrote.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;First_they_came_.." rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;First_they_came_..</a>.