Hacker News Reader

Comment by willis936 | Hacker News Reader

You know who else breaks norms? Alex Jones when he peddles lies and threatens lives for profit. He needs to play by society’s rules if he wants to play by society’s rules. You can’t just pick and choose which norms you’re entitled to. That’s called being an asshole and 10 times out of 10 you will be shown the door. There’s a reason no one cried over him getting the boot. It isn’t an indication of some chilling dystopia. It’s society operating as it should.

View on HN

Nobody wants to be in the position of defending Alex Jones. He's totally indefensible. But that is always how these things start. Once you start regulating content on the basis of factual accuracy, you put these companies in the position of making decisions about political truth, and that is an extremely dangerous thing.

These are really hard ethical questions, and I think both views are reasonable and understandable. But ultimately I think it's more dangerous to put Google in charge of regulating truth. It feels like a win in the short term to ban Alex Jones, and it is a win in the short term. But the long term consequences of things like this are really really important, and the fact that they're obscured by distance doesn't make them any less so.

> But that is always how these things start.

There is no automatism. In many countries hate speech is forbidden, without them devolving into a dictatorship.

I think that's pretty arguable. Hate speech laws in the UK have been used in pretty questionable ways:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/stephen-birrell-s-convic...

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-19883828

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/sep/03/satanic-isla...

This is just a small selection. Obviously the UK has not "devolved into a dictatorship", but it is clearly censoring non-violent political speech.

> "Hope they [ie, Celtic supporters] all die. Simple. Catholic scumbags ha ha."

This is non-violent political speech?

Robert Watts said this about the draft during the Vietnam war:

> They always holler at us to get an education. And now I have already received my draft classification as 1—A and I have got to report for my physical this Monday coming. I am not going. If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.

L.B.J. meaning president Lyndon B. Johnson. Watts did this in front of a crowd while miming aiming with a rifle. The crowd applauded him.

SCOTUS ruled it legal under the first amendment.[1] I agree with their decision and I wish more countries had such stringent protections for freedom of expression.

1. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/394/705

Birrell and Ahmed's convictions seems to go too far, they didn't actual incite violence or criminal activity and I think that's an important line. Is 'I hope they die' reasonably interpretable as incitement to kill? I'd say no, but is it hate speech? I'd have to say yes so from a legalistic point of view the prosecutions may have been legitimate. The concept of hate speech is a slippery slope though.

On the Satanic Islam case, the guy was acquitted on all charges so I don't think that supports your argument.

Anyway thank you for your last comment. I agree some of these cases went too far, but that doesn't mean we're some kind of oppressive police state. Neither of the two people convicted in these cases deserve any sympathy, in a broader moral sense they deserved everything they got, but at the cost of an erosion of our civil liberty protections at the margins that I hope we don't come to regret.

Ya I don't want to make it out to be more than it is. It's certainly not an oppressive police state. But is it chilling speech a bit at the margin? I'm not sure that the answer is yes, but i'm also not sure that the answer is no, and that is concerning to me.

Count Dankula was a big case as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Meechan#Arrest

He was arrested and convicted for literally saying "gas the jews". That is inciting violence, and a very clear case of hate speech.

He was arrested and convicted for making a pug react when he said "Gas the Jews" to make the puppy appear less cute.

I don't think there was any intent for a Pug to start a new holocaust.

That's not incitement to violence unless he actually has the means to do it. If you tell a joke in bad taste, it's not incitement.

It was clearly a joke. Are we also going to ban stand-up comedians for making Holocaust jokes?

"My GF thinks this pug is the cutest thing ever, so I'm going to make it the least cute thing in history - a Nazi"

And then trained it to react to things like "Gas the Jews" and "Sieg Heil". This is not at all a central example of speech inciting violence.

Funnily enough, Nazi Germany also tried to prosecute someone for training a dog to salute when Hitler was mentioned [0] - apparently that was disrespectful.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_(dog)

How was he inciting violence? He trained a pug to do a nazi salute as a way to make it less likeable to his girlfriend(or at least, that is the set-up to the video). A prerequisite for the joke is that "gas the Jews" is an abominable thing to say, and that the Nazi salute is as far away from "cute pug" as you can come.

Hate speech involves intent. Here he used "gas the jews" as a means to project intent on a pug to make a cute pug Nazi. The joke is that a cute pug is a Nazi, and the joke would not work if that wasn't considered that a bad thing. The point of the video is "Nazi = bad".

Jesus, what a brain dead ruling.

This is not how it starts, it’s how it ends. Thousands, maybe millions, of accounts were banned by YouTube in the decade and a half preceding with this for harassing people, selling scams and spreading lies. It’s like the bare minimum a network can do to keep things civil.

The simple fact is that for almost no investment Alex Jones could have his own site serving just as many users per month. My guess is he probably does, and did, so the only thing he’s really missing out on is YouTube‘s free hosting, discovery and traffic and their generous ad revenue split.

I agree that's how these things start. Now doctors in the field and epidemiologists are being censored on YouTube for having unorthodox views on COVID-19.

> Nobody wants to be in the position of defending Alex Jones.

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." - H.L. Mencken

I don't think you understand the point I'm trying to make. I don't care about Alex Jones. I care about collateral damage: Deleting "communist bandits" comments.[1] Banning the Podcast Addict app.[2] Banning other apps.[3][4] I didn't have to look very hard to find these examples. There are certainly dozens more if one cares to delve into the issue.

There are people who we don't know about who are currently having their views suppressed. A few of them probably hold views that future societies will endorse. But because they don't have a voice, it will take longer to make moral progress. Compared to that, Alex Jones is a rounding error.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219427

3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221447

4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229073

> Alex Jones is a rounding error

I will not support any legislation that needlessly endangers individuals. Society needs to protect people. You don’t need everyone to go through a tragedy before a society is illegitimate, just anyone.

I can’t speak for the latter three threads, but I was active in the first one, arguing the same position.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223990

You are so wrong and you dont see it.

You just identified society as corporation and corporation is dictatorship.

He didn't got booted by society and collective ostracism but by a business decision. That's a corporation making decision for the peoole which information the society should be exposed to.

If the society is not resistant to stupid ideas and need to rely on corporations and politicians to police information, that's a malfunctioning society.

Also, ToS are not society rules.

Whose lives did Alex Jones threaten?

> Whose lives did Alex Jones threaten?

Is this a genuine question? This is HN, so it should be. However, I’m not sure how you can be this far down into this chain and not know about Sandy Hook, since it is the very incident that pushed him over the line.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_s...

At the risk of sounding like a troll, I don't see anything in that link about Alex Jones threatening lives.

I think they are saying Alex Jones is responsible because his followers ended up stalking and harassing the victims parents. One could argue he never directly said to do that so it isn't his responsibility, but he also has a big platform.

By this logic Bernie Sanders endangered lives because one of his supporters shot Steve Scalise. To my knowledge Jones just said something like Sandy Hook was fake, which is clearly a bad thing to say, but it doesn't threaten people.

Similar arguments have been for Trump as well

Alex hammered his Sandy Hook conspiracy theory to the point of being sued for defamation, and losing (https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=alex+jones+sandy+hook+lawsu...). Families were forced to move multiple times, unable to visit graves. When the families faced hardship, Alex doubled down on his claims. He never took a moment to ask his supporters to back off or seek a calmer resolution.

Whereas Bernie immediately denounced the shooter and reached out to Steve Scalise. Steve does not blame Bernie for having a deranged fan (https://www.newsweek.com/steve-scalise-shooting-bernie-sande...). Bernie did not imply Steve deserved to be harassed or shot. He has, in fact, asked his supporters to back off (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/bernie-s...).

These two things are obviously not equivalent.

Not quite "never". You may not be aware because the Joe Rogan podcast was the only outlet that covered his apologies and regret for his behavior. For years since the incident he's been telling his followers in his own show that he was wrong about it and to not harass the families.

It's still the case that he changed his attitude too late, only after some of his listeners acted and the escalation became real.

> He never took a moment to ask his supporters to back off or seek a calmer resolution.

This is an interesting point, because had he done that it could be used against him as an admission of guilt.

So do you now expect content creators to be in direct responsibility for any stupid action that any of their self-identified fans do? That's just crazy, how do you even consider this a defensible view?

Sorry, are you trying to convince me of something? I just translated what I think is a fair view of a different comment...

When you tell your fans to do it, yes. There’s a lawsuit about it. Look it up before grandstanding on false premises.

Can you post a quote in which Alex Jones told his followers to threaten the lives of these people? Looks like the lawsuit was only about defamation, not Alex Jones directing people who listen to him to make death threats.

I’m not trying to make some gotcha argument that you can cause your followers to make death threats and therefore you had no part. I’m making the case that Alex Jones is an idiot who says things about water turning the frogs gay, and under no reasonable interpretation of his actions or beliefs can I see that he intended to cause death threats to occur.

> Is this a genuine question?

Incredulity is not an argument, nor does the link you provided have any information on Alex Jones threatening anyone's life.

> Whose lives did Alex Jones threaten?

Well he recently threatened to eat his neighbours!

"I'm ready to hang them up and gut em and skin em and chop them up"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrD1M-OcVts

> He needs to play by society’s rules if he wants to play by society’s rules. You can’t just pick and choose which norms you’re entitled to.

This is "a murderer has not granted others the right to not be killed, so why should we not just hang him right here and now?", make no mistake.

> Alex Jones when he peddles lies and threatens lives for profit. He needs to play by society’s rules if he wants to play by society’s rules.

Do you think Alex Jones should not have been talking about Epstein having a pedophile island, or promote a study by MIT about the effect of groundwater pollution on animals?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com