I’ve never been a big fan of
Alex Jones and his tin foil hat, conspiracy theory style of broadcasting
but his banning by Apple, YouTube, Facebook and Spotify reminds me of
the Martin Niemoller quote at the end of WW2.
“….First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me…”
Below is a cut and paste from Brendan O’Neill’s column in today’s Oz Alex Jones ban shows we’ve outsourced censorship to Silicon Valley
“….So we’re now trusting the
capitalist class — massive, unaccountable corporations — to decide what
we may listen to and talk about? This is the terrible take-home message
of the expulsion of Alex Jones’s Infowarsnetwork from Apple, Facebook
and Spotify, and of the wild whoops of delight that this summary banning
generated among so-called liberals: that people are now OK with
allowing global capitalism to govern the public sphere and to decree
what is sayable and what is unsayable. Corporate censorship — liberals’
new favourite thing. How bizarre.
We live in strange times. On the
one hand it is fashionable to hate capitalism. No middle-class home is
complete without a Naomi Klein tome; making memes of Marx is every
20-something Corbynista’s favourite pastime. But on the other hand we
seem content to trust Silicon Valley, the new frontier in corporate
power, to make moral judgments about what kind of content people should
see online.
It doesn’t matter what you think of
Jones. It doesn’t matter if you think he is mad, eccentric, and given
to embracing crackpot theories about school shootings being faked. You
should still be worried about what has happened because it confirms we
have moved into an era of outsourced censorship.
It shows that what was once done by
the state is now done by corporations. The illiberal, intolerant
cleansing from public life of ideas judged to be offensive or dangerous
has shifted from being the state’s thing to being the business elite’s
thing.
Witness how many campaigners for
censorship now seek to marshal capitalist power to the end of erasing
voices they don’t like — from the campaign that wants corporations to
withdraw advertising from British broadcaster LBC until it gets rid of
Nigel Farage as a presenter, to asking Silicon Valley to deny the oxygen
of publicity to the offence-givers.
So-called liberals and sections of
the political class now want corporations to do their dirty work for
them. They want the capitalist elites to do what it has become
unfashionable for the state to do: ban controversial political speech.
What an extraordinary folly this
is. To empower global capitalism to act as judge, jury and executioner
in the context of what may be said on social-media platforms is to sign
the death warrant of freedom of speech.
People on both the liberal Left and
the libertarian Right argue that what has been done to Jones is
acceptable because this is simply a case of businesses deciding freely
who they should associate with or provide platforms to. This is
disingenuous. This was not a clean, independent business decision — it
was a rash act of silencing carried out under pressure from a moralised
mob that insisted Jones’s words were too wicked for public life. This
isn’t the free market in action — it’s the bending of capitalist power
to the end of enforcing moral controls on speech.
For good or ill, the social-media
sphere is the new public sphere. The expulsion of people from these
platforms is to 2018 what a state ban on the publication or sale of
certain books was to 1618. How can we convince the owners of social
media to permit the freest speech possible and to trust their users to
negotiate the world of ideas for themselves? This is the question we
should be asking ourselves, rather than concocting more ways to
encourage corporate overlords to censor and blacklist….”