The anti-censorship thinking in me is not happy but when it comes to Alex Jones he’s one of the people on this planet that I wish I had omnipotence to remove his voice. He does much more harm than good. Perhaps a solution to his influence is educating people to think critically but alas I think for much of his “fans” (zealots maybe?) it might be too late.
He isn’t being “censored”. Anyone who knows the url to the podcast url can add it. A private company can legally decide who to do business with except for protected classes. The Supreme Court just said that someone didn’t have to offer service to someone if it went against thier beliefs.
If you're referring to the Masterpiece Cakeshop case they said no such thing, the ruling was so narrow (and nonsensical) that it's hard to conclude that it means much of anything, other than the court trying get out of deciding the more general question on a technicality.
I didn’t say it made sense. But conservatives have been fighting to allow for profit businesses to be run based on “religious beliefs” - not only the Cake case but also Hobby Lobby - it’s the other side of the coin.
Apple and others are within their right to not promote him, but it's definitely a form of censorship when the entities that are nearly 100% responsible for actually searching and easily adding the content remove the listing entirely.
Fuck Alex Jones, but I want the tech companies to be totally impartial. As soon as Spotify led with removing music it immediately resulted with demands from political groups to remove more and more. It sets the stage for endless politicizing of everything someone doesn't like because the precedent of intervention is now made.
It gives further power to the mob rule mentality of Twitter where everything you once said is on record, context-less, and used as a kludge to attack by the loudest people whether left or right.
As someone who listens to podcasts like Reason magazine that are often pointed, if not controversial to some, this is highly concerning to me. Don't put Jones on anything but a direct search for all I care but as Sarah Jeong is now learning the pitchforks can come from the right too
If you want to find the Alex Jones podcast, you can still go to Google (like the rest of the world) and the web page and the RSS feed comes up on the first page right below the news articles.
I'm sure there are enough conservative outlets that will inform people how to go to the link. If enough sites link to it, it should appear higher up on Google.
The point is that these companies have immense control over the economy and speech. They should be as neutral as possible, otherwise it will be a tug of war to control them just like everything else in society is becoming.
Also you realize that there's an entire "bring these giants to task over fake news" thing happening right now whereupon we will demand the likes of Google and Facebook take editorial control over content, when the majority of people will only get what comes out of those filters. This is inherently wildly dangerous and absolutely censorship.
Delisted by Google = a company effectively does not exist, the same goes for most things online, and that is the natural next step once some of the giants start to take stricter control. People will only demand more and more things they don't like be removed.
If you don’t turn up on the first page on Google you might as well be delisted anyway. Not every site in the world that wants to become popular is going to appear in the first 20 search results.
For instance in the Apple ecosystem, there are plenty of pundits like Gruber, the guy who runs stratechery, etc who don’t depend on SEO and never have.
If your whole business model is dependent on Google SEO, you’re just one algorithm change away from going out of business - even if you’re not specifically being targeted.
There is a whole conservative ecosystem that most people who care about people like Alex Jones can discover him from.
Like I said, people can’t both argue that Apple should allow side loaded apps and not be a wall garden as a way to foster free speech and at the same time argue that podcasts - one of the few areas where you can get content outside of the walled garden isn’t good enough. If that’s the case, Google allowing side loading of apps is a meaningless talking point.
Again, you are missing the point that there's a huge problem with our regulators trying to control the content on Google as well as when the likes of Apple flexes their muscle and every other company falls in line. That is a speech crippling power that companies should not have, and it is an avenue for politicians to weaken the first amendment in an awful way.
There are millions of podcasts, apps, songs, web pages etc. available. It’s hard to get discovered organically on any platform unless you are featured.
People are always complaining that Apple doesn’t allow you to side load apps and if Apple doesn’t approve your app, you can’t distribute it and it would be fine if Apple curated its own store as long as you could “side load”.
Well here is an example where you can “side load” content by providing a URL and the content doesn’t get treated any differently.
That tells me that even if you could side load apps, people would still be complaining about Apple’s “censorship”.
In fact, between music, video, podcasts, apps, and books, the only two types of contents you can add to thier respective libraries directly from the phone, are podcasts and books.
