Danielle Ryan
RT
August 9, 2018
The celebration on the Left at the quick-fire purge of Alex Jones and InfoWars from social media has been disturbing — not because Jones’ views deserve to be defended, but because his banning is a warning shot against dissent.
It’s important to note at the outset that I have no love for Jones whatsoever — lest this be read as some kind of endorsement or defense of InfoWars. It is not.
When you hound the parents of dead children and promote the theory that inter-dimensional “lizard people” are secretly running the world, you relinquish the right to be taken seriously by a lot of people.
But this is not about Alex Jones or what he believes. It is about the fact that the Left has willfully decided that massive corporations, working hand-in-glove with government agencies, as we know they do, should be the arbiters of truth and should hold the power to decide what we see, hear, read and believe.
Aside from the utterly obnoxious & disingenuous equating of censorship opposition with “defending Alex Jones,” this faith that Mark Zuckerberg, Google execs & their friends will faithfully and benevolently decide what is “hate speech” is just laughable https://t.co/3KXEHvi2n5 https://t.co/ODuuEpxuBE
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 7, 2018
Normalizing censorship
Just a few days before the Jones ban, journalist Matt Taibbi wrote a piece in Rolling Stone about the slippery slope of Facebook censorship. These corporations, he said, have their hands on what is “essentially a direct lever” over nationwide news distribution. “It’s hard to understate the potential mischief that lurks behind this union of Internet platforms and would-be government censors,” he wrote.
Make no mistake: The US government has the power to exert massive, indirect control over speech and political discourse through social networks — and anyone who argues that Alex…