You are assuming this would actually have an effect. Given recent history I am pretty sure people would

A) Not see your debunking because it isn't in their little echo chamber of targeted fitlered online news and content.

B) Wouldn't believe you or critically think about any debunking anyway.

There is a reddit bot that tries to post alternative news sources to subreddits for a given story to encourage a balanced news diet which is a laudable step in this direction.

https://www.reddit.com/user/alternate-source-bot

Just have a look at it's log to see which subreddits it is banned from: https://www.reddit.com/r/alt_source_bot_log/

Your argumentation rests on the assumption that people are convinced only through reason. There are several professions and industries that work just by considering that to be naive.

Prejudices, herd mentality, fear, anger and a lot more biological drives are the main drivers of most people beliefs. "Reason" is just a make up and varnish they apply to make it less ugly.

We can also have a grand old time debunking each and every single one of the crackpot theories that come out of the show, which surprisingly nobody has ever tried before!

There's no way that can go wrong after a while.

For better or for worse, the ideas that grasp the most people have prevailed historically.

Letting one small group of people, regardless of how they're chosen, or how self-righteous they feel, decide what's okay and not okay to say, will never end well.

> Letting one small group of people

What one small group of people? There are literally thousands of social media sites, and people are completely free to join or quit any one of them. If there were no competition in this space, I might be concerned. But just a few short years ago Facebook was unheard of and MySpace was the "monopoly".

Let customers choose. The customers are not one small group of people.

Well, giving him whatever platform he wants has already gone wrong right now. So if deplatforming him goes wrong in the future, and puts us back into the same situation we found ourselves in before today, at least we'll have between now and then to enjoy things, and come up with a plan C.

What consequences have there been?

Gotta preserve that freedom of expression and the marketplace of ideas.

The hegemony trying to shut up someone's political speech only decreases legitimacy across people that were never going to believe him in the first place.

For everyone else, the conspiracy theory that The Powers That Be don't want anyone to hear his message just became conspiracy fact thanks to YouTube, Apple et al.

As I said though, he used his platform to abuse people and should have been banned a long time ago, regardless of his lame conspiracy theories.

> He is an opportunity. By becoming a lightening rod and focal point for a large fraction of a country's misguided thinking, he has made that misguided thinking more fragile. Easier to dislodge. Because now you just need to find a combination of words that helps his followers see him for what he actually is.

His followers see themselves in him. Attack him and they will feel attacked. Attacked people don’t change their minds, they dig into their beliefs harder. The only way to change peoples minds is to realize that you can’t. You can only make it safe for them to change their own minds.

> And if you succeed, everyone who sees will get a lesson in thinking more clearly. They will be more resilient to a future charlatan.

Not without first accepting that they themselves were wrong. This is hard. People see them selves as right. To admit they are wrong is to destroy a little part of themselves (ego).

> So if Alex Jones makes your blood boil, then put that emotion to work. Raise his platform. Discuss him. Debunk his ideas one by one. Use whichever tools appeal to you. If youtube wants to help, then youtube algorithms should be tweaked to encourage people to view both sides of the debate.

Rational debate doesn’t change peoples minds unless they identify as rational people. Then being rationally coherent is important, more so than being right, so they can change their minds. Not everyone holds being rationally coherent that close to their identity.

People will often just dig in harder to avoid being wrong.

For every 100 people you expose him to, some N% find them selves agreeing. The more you talk about him, the more you share and “raise his platform” the more followers you get him.

Simple marketing funnels.

Persistent societal tolerance requires one thing, vehement intolerance of intolerant people.

It’s some prolog level recursive logic.

I'm curious where you heard that, it's an interesting perspective I have not considered before.

In the process i found that they very much so wanted to be a “well” person and going to the docotor was not something a “well” person does.

So instead of pushing then I just focussed on making it safe for them to be unwell. Through holding space, admitting my own vulnerabilities and issues, and by not reacting negatively to their psychosis symptoms.

I recognized the similarity with other instances of changing peoples minds.

Some people want control, and accepting your ideas reduces their perceived control, so you need to make it safe for them to accept the idea (change their mind) while still feeling in control.

Some people see them selves a good people and admitting their actions are biggoted and hurtful doesn’t fit with that so they rationalize the “others” as bad. To change their minds they need a way to feel like good people even though they’ve done biggoted, hurtful things.

Some people are scared and they will rationalize that fear in some mannor. To convince them that there is nothing to fear from that which they rationalised means making it safe for them to experience fear without that justification.

If you want to change opinions you have to change the underlying believes that form them. And you have to do it in a way that they feel they figured it out on their own.

If you do it in a "push down the throat" way it will just make it worse.

In that light i dont think the ban was a good idea...

Why? He and his followers are "not even wrong". I wouldn't argue with any of them for any longer than I would any (other) anti-science person. It's simply not worth the effort (they aren't in reach of reason) and possibly harmful besides (it validates/confirms for them that their views have credibility enough to merit rebuttal).

How would you “debunk” Alex Jones? Certainly not with rational arguments, as if his viewers were at all receptive to reason, they wouldn’t be InfoWars viewers. I am not a regular viewer, but I have seen a few episodes and that I saw, Alex Jones makes no use logic, reasoning, verifiable evidence, or journalistic standards.

So what’s the plan? Counter Alex Jones with an equally unscrupulous manipulator from “our side?”

I think there are valid debates to be had about how much speech should or should not be regulated, even on non-government platforms. But the idea that Alex Jones could be “debunked” seems absurd to me.

Except that doesn't work with trolls. Many of his followers are just in it for the lulz. Engagement just provides more fodder for trolling. You gotta just ignore trolls. And if you can, deny them a platform.

Furthermore, I also disagree with existing censorship of "illegal" stuff by governments. Not just social/political dissent in China, or ankle porn in Saudi Arabia. Also censorship by the United States, such as gambling, piracy, mail-order drugs, and so on.

However, there is arguably a place for government censorship of criminal activity that demonstrably causes harm. For example, child abuse (but not merely sharing of "child porn") or revenge porn, and so on. But not stuff that's racist, sexist, etc but doesn't directly advocate violence.

Specifically, I am guessing this has something to do with Jones taking legal actions against parents whose child was murdered.

I don't think this has anything to do with his "ideas" - that is a severe misunderstanding of the facts of the case. There are still plenty of people with horrible ideas on Youtube. This has everything to do with Jones using his media power to attempt to silence, discredit, and harass parents whose children have been murdered. I mean, seriously, you don't get much lower than that.

Not at all a fan of Mr Jones (the little I've seen makes him seem like a garden variety nutcase peddling inane conspiracy theories), but aren't we just a little bit concerned when someone is banned on the same day by all the major internet content shops due to some unspecified "TOS violations"?

Did he violate all these various different TOS agreements on the same day? If so, how is it not extremely obvious which term he broke?

I think this demonstrates the power of the internet's big content vendors. They can block anyone, at any time, for any reason. They're not accountable nor required to uphold any freedom of speech, yet it's how we all get our information now.

There is still freedom of speech in physical public spaces, but a large and increasing share of our lives is spent on the privatized spaces of the internet, where corporations are the absolute arbitrators of our rights to express and consume speech.

Jones is not a generally sympathetic figure, and few of us will be genuinely sorry to see him go. But what about the next guy marked for deletion?

"First they came for the kooks..."

There's a very big difference between a blowhard who just says things and a blowhard who tries to have people killed. I really hope you can see that.

For calling for Hillary's and Obama's assassination? The Secret Service investigated and determined that it would be too difficult to prosecute in the absence of someone actually taking Jones up on the offer. (If someone had, we wouldn't be having this discussion right now--he'd be serving life in a SuperMax for conspiracy.)

Pure speculation, and unlikely at that. There were dozens of assassination attempts against past presidents, not once has anyone been imprisoned for allegedly inciting the attempt.

This comment, and your previous one as well, are trying to criminalize acts of speech that are protected by the First Amendment.

Which is why there are no current criminal proceedings against Jones.

Generally, I'm hearing this about topics where I'm in strong agreement. Yes, we SHOULD take action against these attempts to exploit our inherent logical weaknesses for the promotion of values we disapprove of (sexism, racism, hatred, violence, etc).

BUT...before I agree, I like to say "How is this different than banning speech/actions promoting something society generally favors but historically did not. Could the same rules have been/be used to prevent the end of slavery, to deny equal rights (including voting rights), to silence those complaining about abuse of power of raising awareness of injustices? Would the rules used to silence peddlers of lies like Alex Jones be used against, say, proponents of generally unpopular and uncomfortable opinions such as improved rights of life for animals, or polyamorous marriage rights? (The only commonality of those being that each has been used as an example by some of a concept treated as ridiculous on it's face).

And here's the thing - I _don't_ ask these questions to try and reach a "enh, guess we should just let everyone be a-holes and eventually it will work out". I want to find a legit answer. Sometimes I can't, but most of the time I circle around some concept that DOES make a difference, even if it's hard to nail down in words. I think that's important because while civilization has generally moved in a positive direction over time, none of that has happened by just waiting it out - people made a fuss, took risks, raised awareness. Governments, churches, media, and other social bodies hashed out opinions and decided what was right, what was wrong, and what was unacceptably TOO wrong. Knowing that these processes can fail does not mean we should give up on them, instead we should work harder to find better success rates.

We are not well equipped to handle societies at the scale we have them (see Dunbar's Number etc), but that does not mean we can't try to get better.

As a result, things like this tend to fall into buckets for me: "Yeah, good idea, but we should be careful", "I wish, but only once we figure out how to distinguish the reasons", "I wish, but honestly there are still too many legit points to remove this from discussion", "Nah, this is important churn to work through" and "Are you crazy? They are right and should be amplified, not silenced".

Are you asking, how is banning someone for peddling hateful conspiracy theories different from banning someone for supporting human rights and dignity? You don't... I dunno, see a few differences between those two messages?

Or is it the future bit that you're worried about—you think that maybe in the future society will generally favor the idea that the parents whose children were murdered should get death threats? And us rubes who banned something like that will think "oh man, this is great, if we had only known!"

No, I'm saying "what rules do we create that would apply to prevent horrible speech now that wouldn't also prevent speech of people doing good but upsetting things?" In the past people in favor of desegragation or womens suffrage or interracial marriage or other "good" things were regarded as trying to overturn the public good. How do we find rules that permit us to say "no!" in the name of good and not have those rules turned against good disturbances of the status quo?

I think there is an answer, or at least an improvement over nothing, but I dont think it is an easy answer, and I dont know what that answer is...yet. meanwhile I try to consider how rules can backfire when such things come up. I shed no tears for Jones, but I'm also glad the issue wasn't easy.

Silencing should not be easy, even though speech empowers jerks and bullies, because speech also empowers so much that has improved the world.

Well, let’s see how deplatforming InfoWars turns out before trying to create general rules about it. I think it’ll work, but no sense in trying to generalize without any data. And maybe we don’t even need general rules, but can do it all on a case-by-case basis.

> and not have those rules turned against good disturbances of the status quo? [...] meanwhile I try to consider how rules can backfire when such things come up.

The people who would misuse rules against hate speech will ban good disturbances of the status quo anyway. Whether or not InfoWars and its ilk get banned will have no bearing on what they do. Trying to create good rules offers no defense against those who refuse to play by the rules.

We can act before we have figured it all out, but we shouldn't postpone thinking about the broader question of when to step in, because the answer won't be simple and we need to have it as good as we can get it BEFORE the next issue comes up, because:

> The people who would misuse rules against hate speech will ban good disturbances of the status quo anyway.

Sandy Hook deniers, Holocaust Deniers - these are terrible people doing terrible things. I don't want to say otherwise AT ALL.

Often an important claim is initially unproven, not generally believed, and _induces discomfort_. Are you suggesting that a colored person is my equal? A woman? A savage? Are you suggesting that the military conducted secret experiments on troops? That the FBI targeted MLK? That the US uses warrantless wiretaps on citizens? That humans can do to other humans what you describe from the concentration camps?

Now we know those claims to be true, but they were initially unpopular. Heck, MLK was disliked/distrusted by the _majority_ of Americans. Silencing the people making those unpopular and uncomfortable claims early would spread injustice.

That's why we want rules - not so that the bad actors can twist them against us, but so that we have a defense against the bad actors shutting down the good actors, and most importantly, so that we have a defense against ourselves being unwitting bad actors. How do I know Sandy Hook was not faked but the DDOS attack on the FCC was? Because both sides were allowed to be heard long enough for evidence to come together.

Saying "the solution is just to never silence anyone" is a popular solution, even though I think it's the wrong one. But "We should only silence those that are wrong" completely dodges how we know who is wrong. Finding a healthy middle ground between these extremes requires work and diligence. If we choose to err on the side of NOT silencing, as I would prefer to, it means the work and diligence becomes all the more important.

Just trusting our intuition as to who is the bad actor that should be silenced has a bad track record.

The best thing to do is just silence their voices; no ifs, ands, or buts.

Remember, these people are against the idea of democracy.

> Remember, these people are against the idea of democracy.

Oh, the irony of following the one sentence with the other.

> You're making the mistake of thinking that Alex Jones and his followers are rational and good-faith actors - a pre-requisite for debate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/the-askhistorians-subre...

How uncharitable of you to write that. I didn't "forget" it. It wasn't relevant to my point. The first line was specific to this situation, but the final two I quoted represent a very universal and timeless position.

In fact, ancient Athens suffered greatly when "silence the voices of the enemies of democracy" became the dominant position in their society:

http://quillette.com/2018/01/25/free-speech-matters/

Universal and Timeless position is a stretch. It is not black and white, it is grey and the first line in OPs comment put context to that grey.

While it would be lovely to have a democracy with an educated rational electorate resilent to hateful demagogues and other threats to the stability of that democracy, we are not there. In that situation you can let it fester or reduce the impact.

Yes it can be abused and we have to be careful. But we are in a Paradox of Tolerance situation.

Rather than state what has already been said: https://hackernews.hn/item?id=17702464 is a good summary.

It's not a good one, though.

This is a man spouting off that there is evidence that Michelle Obama is a man [1]. If that's not a fringe idea I'd like to know what you think one is. To me a fringe idea is one that is so obviously wrong that it is not worth considering its merits.

Doubtless there are many fools willing to consider the 'facts' surrounding Michelle Obama's gender but they are wackos. His ideas are not worth debunking. They are prima facie false. Discussing his punditry gives credence to the notion that his ideas are worthy of consideration. They are not.

His followers will not see him for what he is. They are clearly impervious to facts and reasoning. Anyone willing to follow the rantings of a man spouting off Alex Jones' nonsense is beyond being able to be reasoned with.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alex+jones+says+michelle+obama+is+...