Alex Jones ban shows we’ve outsourced censorship to Silicon Valley

Alex Jones’s Infowarsnetwork has been expelled from Apple, Facebook and Spotify. Picture: AP

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. Radicals and liberals declared themselves “very glad” that these business elites enforced censorship against Jones and his Infowars. We should be “celebrating the move”, said online news site Vox, because “it represents a crucial step forward in the fight against fake news”. Liberals for capitalist censorship! The world just got that bit odder, and less free.

Over the couple of days, Jones and much of his Infowars channel have been “summarily banned” — in the excitable words of Vox — from Apple, Facebook, Spotify and YouTube. Initially, Facebook and YouTube had taken only selective measures against Jones. In ­response to a Twitterstorm about his presence on these platforms, they took down some of his videos. Then Apple decided to ban Jones entirely — removing all episodes of his podcast from its platform — and the other online giants followed suit, or as the thrilled liberal commentary put it: “The dominoes started to fall.”

Despite having millions of subscribers, despite there being a public interest in what he has to say, Jones has been cast out of the ­social media world, essentially the public square of the 21st century, on the basis that what he says is wicked.

This is censorship. There will be apologists for the corporate control of speech, on both the Left and Right, who will say: It’s censorship only when the government does it. They are so wrong. When enormous companies that have arguably become the facilitators of public debate expel someone and his ideas because they find them morally repugnant, that is censorship. Powerful people have deprived an individual and his network of a key space in which they might propagate their beliefs. AKA censorship.

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. What if these bosses decide next that Marxist speech is unacceptable? Or that Zionist speech is dangerous? In green-lighting the censorship of Jones, we grant corporate suits the moral authority to censor pretty much anything else, too.

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.

One thing will spring from this incident: we will witness the severe limitations of right-wing libertarianism. Libertarians’ obsession with the state, their belief that things are bad only if the state does them, means they are incapable of arguing against capitalist authoritarianism, and even support it on the basis that this is the free market being the free market (even though it isn’t). Libertarianism is devastatingly ill-prepared for the new authoritarianism, for tackling the rise of outsourced censorship and informal intolerance.

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.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of Spiked, where these words first appeared (spiked-online.com). Find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.