As you probably already know by now, Alex Jones has been banned from Apple, Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify. That means that the only real social media giant to have not banned Jones is Twitter. This ban will impact Jones and his news organization InfoWars greatly and may actually be the nail in the coffin for them as a company.
Since the ban I've noticed that people seem happy about this mass ban on Alex Jones but I feel like we really need to step back and look at this from a different angle. Would we be as happy if it were someone like Julian Assange? Would we be cheering then? I know I wouldn't but I'm not cheering now. I think all censorship is bad and on this scale, to me, it's alarming.
Now, I understand the hatred for Jones, he's easy to hate, but does that mean he deserves to be silenced? That his news organization as a result will be silenced? I don't think that he does and I think as a, like it or not, news organization it shouldn't happen. If you're independent you depend on those platforms to survive. I just think that it sets a frighting precedent.
I mean, who's next?
Or how about this... Alex isn't the first. Google and Youtube suppress content and ban channels and videos all of the time. Facebook even has a jail and an almighty algorithm that suppresses all sorts of unwanted speech on their platform.
I just don't like it. It feels like 1984 to me. Like book burning. I think we really need to be careful what we wish for especially when main stream media has become unreliable and independent journalists are all we really have left for any truth about the world around us. Where would we be without that?