[The New Yorker] Alex Jones, the First Amendment, and the Digital Public Square

First they came for Alex Jones. And I did nothing.
Then they came for Steven Crowder. And I did nothing.
Then they came for me. And there was no one to help me.

This is our kristallnacht.

 

I think people should be able to post anything they want on youtube but youtube has a right to say "We're not paying you for that." which is basically their stance on it. Which is because of course the advertisers wanting to avoid supporting toxic material.

I don't know if I view them as public utilities but I do understand why people do. Especially now that these companies are basically too big to fail or it certainly feels that way. I do agree with it being a slippery slope.

My point too with that previous post is that sometimes the 'SJWs' are right to be outraged over things being said. Like their reaction of course to Spencer on their campus, why should they be happy about having someone that promotes genocide on their campus? I know Spencer says he'd like a 'peaceful solution' for his dream white ethnostate but people with sense no that's not how it would go down...and when people go "Well, he's just discussing ideas...let's debate these ideas!" it's very...I don't know. There's tons of videos and channels on youtube that push that whole thing (a lot of them were demonitized yesterday) and I feel like there is a line.

Youtube just needs to clearly define its line...

I don't know, it's a complicated thing. I do know too that there are other video sharing websites so it's not a complete ban from the internet.

There probably is a compromise here between left-right that involves regulating big tech businesses so that they don't get so big as to have no competition and thus a competitor to youtube could appear that could be more edgy.

 

It is good that there is not apathy.

The problem is that someone like Spencer or Farrakhan should be able to speak, and speak in public areas. In the past there would be protests, but somewhere along the way it went from protests to forcing the shutdown of controversial speakers.

I am a white man, but I notice changes in tones and changes in society when it comes to certain traditionally marginalized groups in the USA (and world), and I can see where there is concern when you have a speaker call for action that would result in further marginalization or possibly even violence against a minority group. When someone calls for action or violence against the majority, while it can be threatening, the reality is that the majority is the majority.

Also, I do not like the term SJW, but yes there are proper times to be outraged and speak out against what is wrong. The problem is that right now, it feels like everything is being spoken out against and there is instant outrage. All that does is cause people to view it as an exaggeration or look at the more trivial protests and use it to discredit all protests.

 

Good. All those people listed sucked.

Y’all have your own platform.... it’s called Stormfront.

 

We need two internets, a BS and a real one. Let Alex Jones and Crowder post in the BS one.

 

OK, you set up the "BS Panel" to decide who to censor, Boss.

 

I’d love to!

Let all the entertainers/televangelist go to the BS internet.

 

Why are you making offhand comments about trans issues around students?

 

Next, we all live in a simulation in which half the country thought it was a good idea to elect as president a man best known for being a game show host and second-best known for being a conman and incompetent businessman.

 

Is there a RESET button?

 

I should clarify.
I teach Writing 2, which is basically Argumentation/Rhetoric. So it's all about writing arguments on controversial issues of the students' choice: gay marriage, legalizing mar1juana, death penalty, etc. One of my American students raised the topic of transgenderism. Playing advocate, I expressed my skepticism that there can be any doubt whether a human is male or female, except in some rare instances of an XXY chromosome or something. I said, I don't care if people want to identify as "man" or "woman" or "vampire" or "whatever," but "male" and "female" have very clear scientific definitions. So be a male woman or a female man and do whatever you want to, but don't start saying you're a male female or a female male because that is just an abuse of language that renders the words meaningless. You're born with a penis or vagina and just admit it, or you're simply denying reality. I said, "Accepting your own body is fundamental to happiness."

Then they expressed their views and so on. This is already almost going too far in an American classroom. A university classroom! Not high school. If I go one step further, Americans start getting weird. With international students, there is no such problem. If I say,

"If I tell you, standing right here, that I am a female, will you accept that?"
Most of the Americans dutifully say "Yes."
"If I tell you I am not a white man, but a black man, will you accept that?"
WTF? "No. . . ."
"Why? My music is 95% black. All my main heroes are black. My skin is pretty dark. . . . I'm much more similar to a black man than I am to a female, aren't I?"
WTF. You're not allowed to be black.
"What if I tell you . . . I'm not 50 years old, I'm 16. I feel really young! Old people are boring AF. That's not me. And I can run ten miles starting right this second! Can you? I'm gonna have a 16-year-old girlfriend too."
WTF.

Well guess what. Some dude in Holland did exactly that. A 60-year-old DJ filed to legally change his age to 40, because he said being 60 is a disadvantage, and he feels like he's 40 years old: he's a DJ after all; he has many kids and evidently has sex a lot. . . . And he said he had the same right to correct his identity that transgender people were claiming. CNN put out an extremely weak editorial lambasting the guy as a person and comparing him to Trump, with many straw man arguments and not one fact to establish the wrongness of this person. I brought this weak piece of writing to the classroom, we identified the different types of argumentative fallacies in the CNN piece, and that's how things go in my actually-not-so-offhand comments at work.

(The Dutch supreme court rejected the 60-year-old's plea, but, significantly, the only reason they gave was that it would create chaos, not that he was wrong.)

My own feeling is that Americans are so programmed by media that I can stand in front of them and say things that are patently false, like "I am a female," and Americans will accept them.

 

Crowder’s “comedy” resulted in his fans doxxing the Vox guy and harassing him online.

When a person’s influence on a social media platform becomes so outsized that he has followers who will take what he says and consider it as a cue to harass other people, then I think it’s fair for the platform to take that person down a peg.

You should be able to insult someone if you really want to. But accept the consequences if you have attracted a huge following and you do it in a manner that leads to that person’s harassment by your followers (even if you didn’t directly call for it).

 

You are propping foreign students who come from repressive regimes and from cultures that are very deferential, you seem to just like docile students who don't question you.

I agree that young people increasingly think that their opinion should be the only opinion but as a teacher you should be showing them that having a different opinion does should make you an enemy, be that example.

I could say that you seem to be programmed by the media with you labeling everything you dislike about your students as being because they are liberal.

Your last example makes no sense whatsoever, what media is advocating that a person can just say anything they want and everybody needs to accept it, you are looking at everything from the extreme.

You also seem to have a huge issue with gender identity, why is that?

 

Great observations; I have been thinking much the same.

It is interesting (and ironic) that those who are very ready to place further mandates on the private sector (taxes, healthcare, hiring quotas) are, in this case, defending "the right of companies to run their business as they see fit."

 

The fascinating thing, which is also the ironic thing, is that YT's success comes from content makers who were willing to step outside the "vanilla" realm of network TV, to deliver something new and interesting, outside the mainstream narrative.

But then, like network and cable, YT's desire to bring in advertisers is having the same "vanilla-izing" effect.

The answer will be in some new platform, like the bit torrent one mentioned above. But it's going to take a lot of people getting frustrated and leaving YT first.

 

Just wait til the ads get placed in your telepathic stream.

 

Also, YT does have "age restricted" channels, this could be a solution; but of course YT needs to virtue signal.....

 

Relevant Timcast for those interested:

 

It's a complicated issue.

YouTube is a private company and as a private company I believe they should be able to give anyone the boot (or financial boot) for any reason they choose. However, as a matter of principle, I think YouTube should treat all content creators equally by having a TOS that is clear and fair. I feel the same way about CF.net and most digital spaces.

Further, if YouTube goes around picking and choosing who to sanction based on the heckler's veto (and not their TOS), they enter the territory of a publisher and not an open platform. That is where things get weird, because now YouTube becomes legally liable for the content it hosts (and possibly for some of the actions of its users).

We're in a strange new land where we essentially have global newspapers that anyone can write for with little to no oversight, except for some very flawed algorithms in 99.99% of cases. The Big 4 social media companies are effectively bordering on a public utility now, because they act as a digital town square, and being barred (arbitrarily) from any one of them is akin to cyber homicide.

I don't have a good answer to square this circle, but what I do know is that this particular episode is showing a pattern of behavior from the left of trying to silence people instead of just growing thicker skin and sharpening your mind. Beat goobers like Crowder with your words, not a cudgel. Victories for Maza like this one only embolden their targets.

Worse yet, these deplatforming campaigns and advertiser boycotts incentivize social media to become a safespace. It scrubs all of the character and uniqueness out of the platform. I follow dozens of rough-around-the-edges left leaning figures on YouTube. They are all likely going to get bleached out of existence because of this. It's not a left-right issue. This will affect everyone. Crowder can survive this because he's big enough to self-fund, but the new algorithm will nuke hundreds of thousands of smaller content creators pushing YouTube ever closer to some Sinclair/Disney hybrid monstrosity.

This is not what I want.