Infowars gone!

[Mega]

Youtube kill his channel....................

Dam it EJ, You missed your chance!

[dcarrigg]

Re: Infowars gone!

Youtube kill his channel....................

Dam it EJ, You missed your chance!

You know me. I have absolutely no love for Alex Jones. But this feels like an obvious anti-trust violation. The major internet companies all colluded here to simultaneously ban. Just on the surface it looks like a conspiracy that unfairly restrained interstate commerce. Imagine if the airlines selected a company and colluded to ban it from flying. Even if there were terms of service violations, it's the coordination here that bothers me. They should have banned on that basis individually. This is really something else.

[vt]

Re: Infowars gone!

Jones is an idiot and a nut case. However the conspiracy to act in unison does smell.

I do fear they carry it too far, and try to shut down legitimate conservative thought.

[FrankL]

Re: Infowars gone!

Jones is an idiot and a nut case. However the conspiracy to act in unison does smell.

I do fear they carry it too far, and try to shut down legitimate conservative thought.

'idiot and a nut case' or a lucrative business model?

anyway, shouldn't this be protected by free speech?

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Infowars gone!

'idiot and a nut case' or a lucrative business model?

anyway, shouldn't this be protected by free speech?

That might be one of the most important questions we need to grapple with the next few years.
Freedom of speech is vitally important. Disinformation and rabble rousing are deeply damaging. How do we maximize the one while minimizing the other?

Mr. Jones appears to me as an angry, unstable, and self centered person who seems to know two things

1. he is making false statements
2. Some of his millions of customers take his malarkey to heart and believe it is true

He sits on the first amendment making himself a ton of money doing damage.
Our republic often knowingly sets a criminal free in order to uphold a greater goal, believing that the consistent rule of law for millions is more valuable than one murderer set loose to kill again. We do much the same here, so far.

We hope that scoundrels like him would find no audience, that people will turn away and radio stations would not allow him on the air, but alas the allure of the money is too strong and literally millions of people listen to him often.

I shed no tears that these corporations have recently denied him their internet broadcast channels, and see no sinister collusion - just a rare episode of ethics by corporations to skip a few dollars revenue to do something for better reasons.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Infowars gone!

I shed no tears that these corporations have recently denied him their internet broadcast channels, and see no sinister collusion - just a rare episode of ethics by corporations to skip a few dollars revenue to do something for better reasons.

Like I said, I have no love lost for a guy stoking the fires of paranoia in America.

But I think maybe you should rethink the precedent on the conspiracy/collusion aspect.

If all the major shipping or docking companies in America got together and banned Walmart from access simultaneously, even though I don't like Walmart either, it'd be an obvious and fucked up case of anti-trust violations.

Like Jones or not, he's running an 8, maybe 9 figure company with 50 employees that not basically got banned from access to commerce--not by government, but by corporate cabal.

If they had each, on their own terms, decided he violated their terms of service and had their own processes and banned him one by one, that would be fine.

But the simultaneous coordinated shutting out of commerce...that's some mafia-style stuff right there. And if they can do it legally and nobody bats an eye, it's ripe for running protection rackets. I mean, if google can shut your company out of google, youtube, news, maps, android, contacts, calendars, etc etc and facebook and apple do the same on the same day, that's gonna hurt. How much is that worth to ya?

I'm trying to think more like seobook here, and less like the resident partisan.

[Woodsman]

Re: Infowars gone!

That might be one of the most important questions we need to grapple with the next few years.
Freedom of speech is vitally important. Disinformation and rabble rousing are deeply damaging. How do we maximize the one while minimizing the other?...

Great idea! But instead of shutting down fringe actors with small audiences, minimal credibility, and little influence, let's go after the big fish.

Let's start with The New York Times. They were instrumental in selling the Iraq war and the Weapons of Mass Destruction disinformation campaign that ended up costing a million lives, a trillion dollars, and incalculable geopolitical damage to the republics of the world.

Then we can move on to the Washington Post and get them for raising a rabble of unhinged leftists as street fighters in their attempt to overthrow the lawfully elected president through sub rosa machinations like the Steele Dossier.

And when we finish with them, we can go after CNN for their collusion with the Clinton campaign during the 2016 election by sharing debate questions, working with the DNC to shut out Sanders, and being instrumental in running Hillary's "Pied Piper" strategy to make Trump the GOP nominee in the hope that he would easy for her to beat.

After that, we might have time to go after guys like Alex Jones.

You in?

[dcarrigg]

Re: Infowars gone!

'idiot and a nut case' or a lucrative business model?

anyway, shouldn't this be protected by free speech?

I don't think it's protected speech. It's not the government shutting him down. It's private companies. Facebook doesn't have to allow you to use facebook at all, never mind allow you to say whatever you want. Neither does google. If you're using their products, you have to obey their rules just like if you're in their house or at their business. If you say something they don't like, they can kick you out.

That said, what's not right here--and what I suspect is actually a crime--is that they all conspired together to dump infowars on the same day. Dumping infowars is fine. And if they each did it according to their own terms of services, whatever. But every major internet company making a unified press announcement and banning them on the same day? That reeks of conspiracy to unfairly affect interstate commerce. Like I was saying, imagine if all the airlines or shipping firms or private highway owners in the US or something shut out a company shipping physical goods at the same time. Or, maybe crazier, imagine if all the major banks or credit card companies shut out some $100 million firm with 50 employees, and refused to process transactions with them, all at the same time. It's obvious why things like that are crimes when you take it out of the online sphere. And I don't see why it should be any different here. But who knows. The internet baffles and bamboozles old judges all the time.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Infowars gone!

Great idea! But instead of shutting down fringe actors with small audiences, minimal credibility, and little influence, let's go after the big fish.

Let's start with The New York Times. They were instrumental in selling the Iraq war and the Weapons of Mass Destruction disinformation campaign that ended up costing a million lives, a trillion dollars, and incalculable geopolitical damage to the republics of the world.

Then we can move on to the Washington Post and get them for raising a rabble of unhinged leftists as street fighters in their attempt to overthrow the lawfully elected president through sub rosa machinations like the Steele Dossier.

And when we finish with them, we can go after CNN for their collusion with the Clinton campaign during the 2016 election by sharing debate questions, working with the DNC to shut out Sanders, and being instrumental in running Hillary's "Pied Piper" strategy to make Trump the GOP nominee in the hope that he would easy for her to beat.

After that, we might have time to go after guys like Alex Jones.

You in?

No thank you I am not in. You point to only democratic politicians and only large legitimate news organizations with a liberal editorial slant.
"..raising a rabble of unhinged leftist as street fighters" is alarmist, inflammatory and untrue.

You seem to pop up around here and become active just before our elections, starting arguments and sowing discord in our otherwise peaceful threads.

I sometimes wonder if you might really work in an office in Minsk or St. Petersburg, logging hours at a desk trolling a portfolio of web accounts including "Woodsman at iTulip".

Regardless, you may safely assume I am never "in" for your plans.

[Woodsman]

Re: Infowars gone!

No thank you I am not in. You point to only democratic politicians and only large legitimate news organizations with a liberal editorial slant.
"..raising a rabble of unhinged leftist as street fighters" is alarmist, inflammatory and untrue.

You seem to pop up around here and become active just before our elections, starting arguments and sowing discord in our otherwise peaceful threads.

I sometimes wonder if you might really work in an office in Minsk or St. Petersburg, logging hours at a desk trolling a portfolio of web accounts including "Woodsman at iTulip"...

Brilliant! Thrifty, you made my day.

Hey, did you know my avatar is a painting by a Russian artist? A tsarist one, but hey, what's the diff.

You keep being you, now.

[Milton Kuo]

Re: Infowars gone!

No thank you I am not in. You point to only democratic politicians and only large legitimate news organizations with a liberal editorial slant.
"..raising a rabble of unhinged leftist as street fighters" is alarmist, inflammatory and untrue.

You seem to pop up around here and become active just before our elections, starting arguments and sowing discord in our otherwise peaceful threads.

I sometimes wonder if you might really work in an office in Minsk or St. Petersburg, logging hours at a desk trolling a portfolio of web accounts including "Woodsman at iTulip".

Regardless, you may safely assume I am never "in" for your plans.

Woodsman is making a good point, though. If YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook are blocking InfoWars for spreading disinformation and fomenting dissent, why can't we hold large institutions to the same standard? While InfoWars spews a lot of crazy nonsense, I'm not aware that all of it is false. Furthermore, can you point out a direct negative outcome that was driven by misinformation from InfoWars? I don't think their audience is large enough to have ever influenced national policy.

That is entirely different in the instances of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the television news channels such as CNN. The invasion of Iraq during George W. Bush's presidency being an especially egregious case where the media provided the political cover to wage what would have been a highly opposed war. It wreaks of the yellow journalism that got the U.S. into the Spanish American war. Likewise, CNN's intentional leaking of debate questions to the Clinton campaign during the run-up to the presidential election borders on election fraud. The only difference is that Trump somehow managed to overcome incredible odds where cheating by the establishment didn't matter.

I don't think the New York Times, et al. are actually a liberal voice. I call them pseudo-liberals because I see very little in those papers that really strikes me as what classical liberals were: people truly concerned with controlling monopolies, making sure labor got a fair share of the pie for their work. Instead, what I see is that they are instruments of the wealthy, both Republican and Democrat, and use identity politics and other divisive tactics to distract from the real problems. There's been a recent flap over the NYT's hiring of Sarah Jeong and her very racist written comments over the past decade. Why is it that she isn't fired when someone else might be fired for making different yet similar comments? Is this really the kind of newspaper that we can trust? And it's not just the NYT but this is just the most recent brouhaha from the pseudo-liberal media that should make clear that they have an agenda other than just reporting the news: they are attempting to make the news.

[vt]

Re: Infowars gone!

Woodsman is one of the few that really understand what is going on with the electorate. And this is not a recent event.
The people by a sizable majority hate both parties:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/n...flna8C11374594

I feel a third party will take power in the next 10 years and replace one of the two existing ones. There may be a remnant of the replaced party for awhile but they won't ever have power again.