By now, everybody who goes online at all should have some inkling that Alex Jones was just banned by several large social media platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Originally a rather fringe figure who promoted various conspiracy theories about the Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11, the Sandy Hook shooting, the Federal Reserve, vaccines, chemtrails, etc., Jones rose to prominence during the 2016 election campaign when he came out as a Trump supporter and his audience and Trump's began to overlap. His increasing prominence combined with his support for Trump led to greater public controversies over his being given a platform, which eventually culminated in his booting from most social media platforms.
It's no secret that Trump has attacked many groups of people: illegal (a.k.a. Mexican) immigrants, Muslim immigrants (in the infamous "Muslim ban" comment), Black Lives Matter activists. His vice president Mike Pence and his evangelical base have also opposed feminism and displayed animosity towards the LGBT community. Alex Jones has also engaged in attacks on many of those groups; he promotes a "white genocide" conspiracy theory (in which kneeling NFL players are supposedly involved) and has been endorsed by white nationalist groups. He has a very acrid style and a tendency to expose people to abuse, as he did to the parents of Sandy Hook victims. So, with all the pieces he's put out, he was bound to speak hate (by the social media platforms' definitions) anyway.
Well, perhaps not by Twitter's definition, seeing as Twitter did not ban him. Well, according to Oliver Darcy Jones did repeatedly violate Twitter's rules, but for whatever reason, Twitter decided not to discipline him. Perhaps it wanted to avoid accusations of political bias, which could include an investigation by Congress (even though Congress has no authority to discipline Twitter for discriminating on ideological grounds). Perhaps it is Twitter's practice to avoid rocking the boat. But Twitter has suspended other accounts for similar reasons, including those of provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and KKK leader David Duke. But Alex Jones is more "mainstream" now that Trump has endorsed him, whereas Yiannopoulos and Duke--while notable--have not achieved similar inroads with a major politician. And after the "shadowbanning" fiasco, the last thing Twitter wants is to be seen discriminating against mainstream conservatives.
Even though "shadowbanning" was never really a thing (all Twitter's algorithm did was stop auto-completing search entries of certain political accounts), and some liberal figures were affected by the policy too, many Republicans became angry with Twitter for making it harder to find accounts of mainstream conservatives like Ronna McDaniels (Reince Priebus' successor as GOP chairwoman).
And perhaps they are right to be suspicious. After all, Silicon Valley corporations are very liberal (see: James Damore's firing from Google and the millions of dollars it donates to Democrats) and, due to its position at the cutting edge of society's capabilities, heavily populated by young people. And young, radical leftists have a history of trying to turn dialogues into monologues by deeming every opinion they disagree with "hate speech." At Middlebury College, a professor guarding sociologist Charles Murray was so severely assaulted by a student that she had to go to the emergency room. And why? Because student protestors foresaw "assault" by Charles Murray's speech due to his brief book chapter about race and IQ, even though Murray hadn't intended to talk about that AND had never supported racist causes.
This is dangerous. People tend to view "the norm" in light of their own experiences, so if students are exposed to only one side of an argument while young, they will tend to view the other side as extreme, even hateful (as tolerance and kindness are the foundational values of education these days, the negative extreme defaults to "hate"). And like it or not, social media plays a large part in raising kids now. So while it is important to teach kids to be kind, it is also important to teach them that people are going to disagree on the issues of the day for reasons having nothing to do with hate.
For example, I have been present at multiple anti-abortion campaigns. Not only was there not a single misogynistic sentiment expressed, but many of the organizers were themselves women and several identified as feminist! But the prevailing narrative is that the other side is fueled by hatred, and if social media executives (who as leaders of Silicon Valley are quite likely to support progressive causes) subscribe to that narrative, they are more likely to remove "hateful" posts that may not actually be all that hateful. When these posts are removed, the dialogue gets even more one-sided, and the other side will be viewed as even more extreme, and so on and so forth in a vicious cycle.
Am I suggesting that there is no such thing as hate in political discourse? Absolutely not. Sometimes the construction and support of certain public policies is clearly derived from animosity. But does this mean that anyone who agrees with them is filled with hatred? No. With a few very rare exceptions, such as support for the Ku Klux Klan and similar organizations (which accomplishes nothing other than oppression), people can agree with a position that is often called "hateful" for other reasons. For example, they may support voter I.D. laws due to concern about election fraud. Or, as I described above, they may oppose abortion because they truly believe that life begins at conception.
But when one side dominates the conversation, there is an ever-present danger of dissenters automatically being deemed "hateful" (in today's context of discrimination as the ultimate evil). Shutting down the marketplace of ideas prevents the best ones from winning out on their own merits; "groupthink" has been responsible for many a terrible decision. Worse, automatically deeming dissenters to be haters creates a "boy-who-cried-wolf" problem. When a genuine Neo-Nazi, rape apologist or Westboro Baptist "Church" disciple appears, people will not realize just how problematic these ideas are since they are told that everything outside the norm is "hate." People will be attracted to "hateful" ideas precisely because they are banned--and that could include genuinely hateful sentiments alongside merely politically incorrect ones. InfoWars traffic skyrocketed after Alex Jones was banned from most social media. Do we want traffic to Neo-Nazi/MRA/kill-the-gays websites to skyrocket as well?
Of course we don't; we are committed to being an equal society. But for that to happen, we need to be a free society. Even the Soviet Union and other communist countries were not truly equal; the political elites exempted themselves from the austerity measures imposed on the population as a whole. Given the ubiquity of Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media, I would argue that a social media ban is a violation of free speech, even if not a legal one. While there are certain justifications for restricting speech (e.g. time/place/manner, defamation, fighting words, extreme obscenity), it is dangerous to go down that road without strict controls. For ideological speech restrictions to work, a society must be as trodden upon as Mao's China or Kim's North Korea. If we don't want to go down that road, we must be very judicious about what speech absolutely can't be tolerated, always keeping in mind the backlash that could result. I don't like Alex Jones; I think he's full of hot air. He's an idiot and a jerk. But a container of hot gas must be vented sometimes, or else it will explode and damage everything around it.
