> But from what I gather Alex is an entertaining quack who is ultimately harmless except in the sense that his message is subversive to the “wrong” groups.
"Jones insisted that the kids’ deaths were a great hoax, a performance staged by gun-control activists backed by the American government. As a result of that, Noah Pozner’s family says, they have been stalked and subjected to death threats by Jones’s legions of epistemically gullible yet digitally savvy followers—a fact that has, doxxing by doxxing, forced them to move seven times over the past five years, ever farther away from the body of their slain son."
I’m not sure I’d call Alex Jones harmless considering the parents of Sandy Hook victims received death threats after his show labeling them as actors in a false flag operation.
I think this is the fine line where the limit should be drawn.
I am entertained as anyone by conspiracy theories, and I am free to believe them or not. But if tomorrow morning, I would wake up with my name on infowars, saying I am part of the plot, it would not take long to create serious problems.
I didn’t watch the video, just read the transcript. Your quote is the headline but it’s merely paraphrasing what was actually said.
The transcript is talking about how media is trying to drum up a narrative that any violence against the media is Trump and InfoWars and Breitbart fault. This is seen as another means of censorship and blame gaming.
The specific example that comes to mind is of the attack in Baltimore Capital Gazette which just last week journalists were yelling “What about Baltimore?!” at Sarah Huckabee Sanders, when we know the gunman had specific personal animus and had even made Twitter threats against the paper, and yet CNN anchors claim it’s Trump fault for inciting violence against reporters....
Statements like this are purely political. There was no call for violence. This is discussing current events and the narrative around inciting violence against the media (“Acosta’s life threatened at Trump rally”) which is kind of an important story going on right now. But because they are on the “wrong” side of the narrative, we’ll find a way to call it hate speech and ban it?
I do have a fairly strongly held belief that speech is not “dangerous” unless it is a direct incitement to violence. I believe it’s much more likely (and has happened consistently throughout history) that “subversive” speech is labeled as dangerous in an attempt to silence the message or messenger. Very often the benefit of time shows that the particular censorship was actually about oppression and not security.
I actually have learned a lot over the last few years on HN in discussions on all sorts of thorny topics with people holding diverse viewpoints.
Throughout those discussion I try very hard to avoid ad hominem attacks, or personally disparaging remarks. We’re not obligated to engage or reply to comments espousing different viewpoints, but if we do, we’re obligated to keep it civil please!
Alex Jones torments families of Sandy Hook victims with lies in order to enrich himself. Private social platforms can not only choose to not to be complicit in this evil--they have an obligation not to be complicit.
The guidelines specifically ask you not to do what you did with this Sarah Jeong and Quinn Jones thing: Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
I think the totality of my comment makes clear the relevance. In the matter of interpreting historical internet posts and judging whether the speaker should be censored or punished for them, or not, the lines are quite blurred.
Is there not something worth discussing here — as we examine the reactions to Sarah Jeong, Quinn Jones, Alex Jones.... to me these are all part of the same movement. By which I don’t mean necessarily something explicitly planned and orchestrated, but rather shifting public consensus on public discourse, what consequences should be dealt, and how the visceral response in these cases may be weaponized and subverted.
Upon second thought though, perhaps the more apt comparison is Roseanne Barr. I certainly agree that bringing up Jeong did not result any useful dialog on the topic, so I’ll be more careful about that in the future.
They aren't. The lines between a professional conspiracy- and snake-oil-monger, a person whose friendship with Nazis made them lose a job offer and a person against whom a targeted smear campaign failed are not at all blurred. These things are not closely related and piling Roseanne Barr on to this blob of amorphous grievance-gunk just makes it more sealion-shaped and sealion-sized. It's not a good HN topic - polite flamebaiting is still flamebaiting.
Even more clearly, Apple choosing to be selective about who they'll retain in their podcast catalog is not at all the same discussion as The New York Times choosing who to hire. This is practically the textbook case of an unrelated controversy derailing a thread.
That's true, the distinction is greater than I made it out to be.
On the other hand, derailment was a serious concern during the industrial revolution and some thread-workers violently opposed new, disruptive technology. This is a technology site. Bears, beets, Battlestar Galactica, all this has happened before and will happen again and is totally not unrelated.
My comment was in relation to the waterfall effect which proceeded Apple’s decision to delist InfoWars, not to Apple exercising editorial control over its store, which IMO by itself would be entirely unnewsworthy.
If you don’t see any parallels to the NYT firing a new tech editor based on her offensive tweets and the NYT not firing a new tech editor for her offensive tweets, then I can certainly understand how you don’t see any relation to InfoWars being censored, and I won’t press the point.
It seems like you feel like this is all so cut and dry, however the public discussion on all sides would seem to discredit that notion. It’s what NYMag calls, “on the one hand, utterly obvious ... and at the same time muddled and thorny.” [1]
I had to Google the sealion reference, I think you’ve quite abused the term. [2]
> I don’t know anything at all about Jeong, other than some highly... erm... problematic old tweets.
That's the power of a smear campaign, right? Planting a negative perception in people who previously had no attitude about a person. I recommend researching a bit before repeating the message of the campaign ("racist tweets"). Jeong is okay.
>"Various campaigns have been trying to downrank, delist, or demonetize sites like InfoWars or Breitbart."
Good, because those sites are absolutely notorious for spreading lies and false rumors that have caused documented harm to innocent people, under the guise of "asking questions".
It is way too easy to spread lies in simple black/white slogan form. They embed themselves and influence opinion. It takes much more effort to disprove them, because reality is complicated and nuanced.
There's your asymmetric information warfare. The virulent hatemongers know that people want simple scapegoats, and they play to that, with anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT, anti-tolerance retoric.
