Why iTunes, Facebook, YouTube were right to kick off Alex Jones

Alex Jones has been banned from most major tech platforms after years of being allowed to use them.

When the American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones appeared, shrieking, on the BBC’s Sunday Politics back in 2013, the host Andrew Neil called him “the worst person I’ve ever interviewed”.

Then he chortled “we have an idiot on the program” and made head-tapping cuckoo signs, as Jones hollered his way into the break for the local news.

A couple of years later, as an aspiring Republican candidate, Donald Trump appeared on Jones’s online show, where the pair discussed Trump’s wholly fictional memory of seeing New Jersey Muslims celebrating the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre.

Remarkably, Jones remembered it, too. “I will not let you down,” said the future president. Within days, he was promising a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”.

Since then, Jones has gone on to spread outright lies about the victims of school shootings and have a core role in spreading a bizarre conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton masterminding a paedophile ring out of a DC pizza restaurant.

Last week, finally, most content from Jones’s Infowars was pulled from Apple’s iTunes, Facebook and YouTube. All have accused him of breaching the terms or standards of using their sites.

Clearly, though, the real motive is belated guilt, for Jones is a monster. What is more, he has enabled other monsters. And these sites, one and all, have enabled him.

Even so, it feels as though there should be a strong free speech argument against what has happened to Alex Jones. Personally, I felt its full force when I started writing this column, and went looking on YouTube for the Trump interview mentioned in paragraph two and found it gone, leaving only a grey screen and a “This video is unavailable” in its wake.

Yet the internet being the internet, it can of course still be found if you look. The website Infowars itself is still online. Jones has not been silenced. He has just been turned down a bit.

The exception is Twitter, where Jones and Infowars remain utterly at large. Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and chief executive of Twitter, has no plans to change that. His company, he insisted, was committed to “impartiality regardless of political viewpoints”. What’s more, he continued, “accounts like Jones’s can often sensationalise issues and spread unsubstantiated rumours, so it’s critical journalists document, validate, and refute such information directly”. In other words, content on Twitter is not Twitter’s problem. Move along.

Of course, this is not the full story. For one thing, Twitter has a global staff of under 4000 people, and hosts about half a billion new tweets a day, and thus has a commercial imperative in making sure it doesn’t have to police the content it hosts. Politically, it also has a big orange problem in the shape of the 45th president of the United States. Twitter is Trump’s major channel of communication, not just with voters but also with the world at large. I genuinely think it more likely than not that he will one day use Twitter to declare a war. If Twitter is responsible for users’ tweets, is the company also responsible for his?

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

Within Twitter HQ, this is not a fanciful concern. If you or I stayed up late at night threatening to blow people up, they’d probably shut us down. In January, were Trump’s 1am tweets threatening North Korea with the nuclear button so different? In The New York Times last week, one technology columnist wrote that Twitter sources had told her that the company had an “a pull-emergency-brake plan” to bring into play if Trump crossed a “secret Rubicon”.

It is an open question whether the social media companies are responsible for the rise of Donald Trump, but they are certainly responsible for the rise of Alex Jones.

Dorsey’s suggestion that journalists should “refute” his claims casts Twitter in the mould of that infuriating parent you see on the train, who regards her own screaming toddler as a problem you’ll all just have to deal with together. Like all else fake newsy and awful, his prominence is not some bizarre act of God but the direct result of tech giants’ business models.

I first heard of him almost 20 years ago, not long after he was fired from a radio station in Texas because his employers decided he was embarrassing. Back then, his listeners numbered in six figures on a good day. Tech giants, though, were immune to embarrassment. By the time YouTube pulled the plug last week, his videos had been viewed 1.5 billion times. At what cost? Would Trump speak like Trump if he wasn’t competing for oxygen with the likes of Jones? Would Boris Johnson speak like Boris Johnson now does if he wasn’t competing with Trump? Discourse, generally, has been abased.

What’s more, Twitter knows full well what it has enabled. Last week, the firm asked that the names of its team for tackling trolls be kept secret, for fear that they would be harassed by trolls. The world, generally, has been made uglier.

It didn’t have to happen and it doesn’t need to keep happening. This isn’t about free speech, because social media platforms are not public space. They have pretended to be, because it has suited them to absolve themselves of responsibility for the content they have carried, but it has always been a lie. In fact, you have no more right to post on Facebook or Twitter than you do to storm up to the desk next to mine and demand that The Times publishes your leader column instead of its own.

Kick Jones off social media and his free speech is not being impeded. Indeed, kick Trump off social media and nor is his. These are websites. They are publishers. They are private entities and they are not the fabric of anybody’s democracy. Long may they remember it. And long may we.

The Times