FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
Big Brother Extends the Thought Police in the U.S.
Aug. 7, 2018 (EIRNS)—In the past few days, Facebook, Apple, YouTube, and Spotify threw Alex Jones and his Infowars off their platforms, podcasts, pages, and channels.
Jones, who celebrated 30 years as a “radio talk show” host last week, was praised by the Fox News station (Hannity got his start with Alex Jones) for being the initiator of the conservative talk show process. Jones received a direct phone call from President Donald Trump while on the air, congratulating him for his career.
The Infowars website got (before today) as many as 10 million visitors a month, while his YouTube channel has roughly 2.4 million subscribers, with 17 million views in the past 30 days.
The social media companies say they blocked Infowars not because of his support for Trump and his attacks on the Russiagate hoax, but because, in Spotify’s words, “Infowars expressly and principally promotes, advocates, or incites hatred or violence against a group or individual based on characteristics.” (How about Maxine Waters, one may ask.)
On May 17, 2018, Facebook announced that it was “partnering” with that rabidly anti-Russia, Maidan-supporting NATO outpost, the Atlantic Council, “to combat election-related propaganda and misinformation from proliferating on its service.” Just a few months later, Facebook moved to shut down several of Jones’s pages, on the pretext that it was
“glorifying violence, which violates our graphic violence policy, and using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants, which violates our hate speech policies.”
The reality is that Jones, although often reporting rather outrageous speculations, has mobilized millions to reject the mainstream media lies. In particular, Jones went after British agent Robert Mueller on his show, using the image of a Western-style showdown:
“We’re going to walk out in the square, politically, at high noon, and he’s going to find out whether he makes the move first, and then it’s going to happen,”
miming a pistol with his hand. This is called inciting to violence!
Facebook acknowledges the real issue negatively in its statement:
“While much of the discussion around Infowars has been related to false news, which is a serious issue that we are working to address by demoting links marked wrong by fact checkers and suggesting additional content, none of the violations that spurred today’s removals were related to this.”
Thou dost protest too much.
As Sen. Ted Cruz said in response: “Who the hell made Facebook the arbiter of political speech? Free speech includes views you disagree with.”
As private companies, social networks are not required to adhere to the First Amendment, the anti-Trump press gleefully reports.
