Tech Censorship: Alex Jones Reinstated on X/Twitter
Communication Mediums and Altered Sensibilities
In the year 2024, there are several important events to which our culture must come to terms.
One may include the looming presidential election, foreign wars, the issue of border security, artificial intelligence, to name a few.
And, one may add, the topic of internet censorship, for it is a reality that is both longstanding and ongoing.
In speaking of this, I must align our focus here on some recent news-worthy reports.
Featured in the tidings recently was arguably the most censored individual in world history, radio talk-show host Alex Jones.
Last month, on December 10, 2023, social media outlet X, formerly Twitter, reinstated the account of media analyst Alex Jones after a ban of nearly five years.
The decision was made following the results of a poll, organized by owner Elon Musk, in which almost two million votes, or about seventy percent of voters, were cast in support for Jones’ return.
In reply to the vote, Musk wrote that, “The people have spoken and so it shall be.”
As reported by the Associated Press, “Musk, who has described himself as a free speech absolutist, said the move was about protecting those rights. In response to a user who posted that ‘permanent account bans are antithetical to free speech,’ Musk wrote, ‘I find it hard to disagree with this point.’”
Should readers be unaware of the highly-publicized and applauded history of Jones’ mass-scale censorship and deplatforming at the hands of Big Tech and their contrivances, then perhaps restating some of the historical record may be of use.
In the most high-profile instance of social media censorship, much of Big Tech’s key platforms moved in a highly coordinated August, 2018, effort to prohibit radio host Alex Jones and his news outlet InfoWars from exercising their free speech. Some of the platforms upholding the banishment were Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, Apple, Periscope, and later, Twitter. Silicon Valley’s reasoning for inhibiting Jones was that his free speech was tantamount to spreading hate, or in the case of Twitter’s deliberation, abusive behavior.
Jones’ thought-crimes were evidently so egregious that Big Tech believed it necessary to interfere with his ability to pay for goods and services by banning him from the payment processor PayPal. Apparently, even that action was deemed an insufficient disciplinary measure for Jones’ grave offenses, and thus his ability to search for employment opportunities was also forbidden, in the form of the radio host being banished from LinkedIn, an online forum for job applicants.
On May 2, 2019, Facebook announced they had designated Jones as “dangerous,” and said it would remove him from its platforms, including Instagram.
At the time, some found it odd that none in American media elected to defend Jones’ right to vocalize his opinion in the Digital Age.
Well, to say that none opposed the mass-censorship of Alex Jones is not exactly accurate.
Indeed, for some did not expect to hear of HBO talk-show host Bill Maher disagreeing with the move, in which he remarked on his HBO show on August 17, 2018, that “if you’re a liberal, you’re supposed to be for free speech.” He went on to say that, “That’s free speech for the speech you hate. That’s what free speech means. We’re losing the thread of the concepts that are important to this country.” The host added, “If you care about the real American sh** or you don’t. And if you do, it goes for every side. I don’t like Alex Jones, but Alex Jones gets to speak. Everybody gets to speak.”
When Jones first became deplatformed, also taking it upon himself to speak out was the political commentator Jimmy Dore, who remarked that, “Why are we so afraid that human beings can’t decipher for themselves what to believe and what not to? This isn’t the first time there’s been alternative publications spouting news that went against the establishment. You get to do that in America. You get to say, ‘you know, uh, I remember, uh, the biggest fake news story the Washington Post published, that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction . . . that was their editorial board saying that . . . this is not a slippery slope, we’ve already slipped. Once you ban anybody, you’re there, right? They’ve already suppressed us, they’re doing that right now, and now they’re just gonna go to full-out bannings.”
The comedian went on to say that, “the way to debunk Alex Jones isn’t to suppress his speech, that makes him a martyr, it actually lifts him up and makes more people interested in what he has to say, and then all his accusations of the establishment suppressing him ring true because it actually is happening. This antidote for bad speech in a free, open society is not suppression of that speech. The antidote to bad speech in a free and open society is more speech.”
Dore added that, “You don’t all of a sudden start saying, ‘well I have a secret group of…Silicon Valley billionaires, and they’re gonna decide what’s actually free speech and what’s not. They’re going to protect us. I don’t need them to protect us. I don’t need some nanny state government to protect me from harmful speech. I don’t need a billionaire in Silicon Valley to protect me from harmful speech. I’ve been exposed to harmful speech my entire . . . life. So what else are you gonna start banning? What is fake news? Because I’ll tell you, the biggest fake news story of my lifetime was Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction. That was the biggest fake news propaganda . . . story in the history of my life. Should the Washington Post be deplatformed then, because they posted fake news? Yknow, we just did a story . . . Facebook took down a newspaper’s Facebook page because the newspaper, for the fourth of July, posted the Declaration of Independence, and they took it down because of hate speech inside the Declaration of Independence. That’s a fact, that happened. And they had only posted the first half of the Declaration of Independence. And their Facebook page got a strike, or temporary ban, and they were afraid to post the second half because it might happen again. So that’s the world we’re living in right now.”
But it is encouraging that, in the early days of 2024, some seem willing to discern the value that might be found in the claim to speak unconstrained through digital technology.
Part of the reasoning behind Musk’s decision to lift Jones’ ban is because he, in the view of some, deserved to be reinstated. Others go further, and assert that Jones never should have been banned in the first place. To be sure, for an honest and complete assessment of Jones’ track record does show that he has a greater track record for being accurate than almost every person in the mainstream media for decades. And, as we know, a great many things that Jones has warned about in the past have come to pass, and it is no mistake to say that our culture is now having to address many of the concerns that he took pains to bring awareness to many years, or even decades, ago.
It is even claimed by some that Jones was banned because significant cultural and technological figureheads desired to silence his voice in order to burglarize the 2020 presidential election.
But this is not to say that internet censorship is now denounced by all in culture, for it is still apparent that the worth in one’s capacity to speak freely, at least for many, conflicts with the tenets of living in the digitally-supported world of search engines, websites, blogs, social media and even financial institutions.
To be true, whereas some will denounce internet censorship, many others remain committed to its criminalization and banishment from civilized society.
Should readers suspect that such a thing is not occurring in culture, then it is well to recall the relatively recent and unprecedented episode in which Alex Jones was ordered to pay $1 billion for saying mean things in October, 2022.
Still, it is a peculiar thing to observe, at least for those who weigh history, that the liberal base, who were at one time pioneers in the fight for free speech issues, have, alongside the left-leaning tech giants, decided to engage in coordinated methods of widespread social control.
But those who study technology’s charted path in culture are not taken aback by this, for the thing to remember here is that changes in our mediums of communication always convey consequences to culture.
And it is clear to see that alterations in our mediums also alter how a culture communicates, as steadfast watchers of technological progression will testify.
What I wish readers to grasp is that our culture’s mediums of communication always foster a way of changing people’s sensibilities.
Indeed, whereas it would be a much more difficult matter to try and ban someone for vocalizing their beliefs, or broadcasting their opinions, or for simply speaking their mind in an oral-based culture, a culture dominated by the sway of the image-based medium and the magic of lightning-fast information transmission can more effectively lead to the promotion of censoring speech among those who use it.
Whereas in a writing-based culture personal ideas are welcomed and creativity are allowed to flourish, the unconstrained flow of information propagated to culture through the internet promotes the idea that certain words, thoughts, beliefs, concepts and assertions are worthy of being removed from the national conversation without sufficient contemplation of its consequences.
Whereas in a print-based culture the vast majority of information can be easily transmitted with little interference, our image-based mediums of television, social media and YouTube advances the thought that a culture needs protection from the novel and unfounded notion of what some might deem to be “harmful” information.
Whereas in culture’s past misspeaking or having unconventional opinions has been understood as an easily pardoned, accepted and expected property of the human condition, our digital tools have helped to modify and recast one’s fair and candid missteps into cardinal scandals.
The point I am trying to make is that the mediums of communication at our disposal inevitably alter our culture’s information environment.
Should readers still be unsure about this truism and still yearn for more evidence that this is so, that our ubiquitous image-based mediums alter the information world, that technology invites consequences to culture, that the high-speed information landscape becomes radically altered through rapid and uncontrolled dissemination of information, that our mediums places upon culture altered sensibilities, it is accurate to say that there is still a great deal of evidence showing that this is so.
But, if one is seeking a definitive answer to the question Is there any evidence that internet censorship is actually occurring in culture?, one could probably just ask Alex Jones.
Great discussion Theo!