Recall when Alex Jones was taken down from Twitter? That was 2018. It was just the beginning of what became a torrent of purges of public life.
I’m trying to re-create my thinking at the time because I honestly was not that concerned about it. I should have been. In those days, however, I had greater trust in the tech platforms and figured that they needed the freedom to manage their platforms as they saw fit.
I had no idea of the extent of government involvement in Twitter or Facebook, which was growing without announcement even at the time. Of course, it has ballooned to the point that all these platforms are state actors. At the time, this was not obvious.
Plus, Mr. Jones was never my style in either content or presentation. I saw him as a rabble-rousing rightest—I’m partial to neither rightism nor leftism—who offered more in the way of conspiracy-ladden complaints than solutions. Plus, his voice hurt my ears in some aesthetic sense. There should be no one standard of the freedom to speak, but it is ultimately hard to bury one’s own biases when it comes to such judgments.
A few days later, I was in private conversation with commentator Dave Rubin, who at the time was traveling with Jordan Peterson as a warm-up act. Mr. Jones had just been taken off Twitter as well as many other venues. Mr. Rubin, whom I did and still do very much respect, said to me:
“The deplatforming of Jones is just the beginning. They hit the most obvious targets first, the ones with the least-prominent defenders. Most responsible conservatives and libertarians might be indifferent or even glad that he is gone, but they don’t understand. We are on the list, too, maybe not right away but eventually. If they can get away with this with Jones, they can and will eventually destroy us all.”
I sat there a bit stunned. I had to think about this. Was he correct? I was unsure at the time.
Maybe that sounds obvious to you now six years later. At the time, his comments truly startled me. I had not thought about it this way, I’m sorry to admit. I had, in my own mind, otherized Mr. Jones and felt that sense of personal pride that I was not like that guy. I believed that they, whoever they are, might just be trying to clean up public conversations from vagabonds and rabble-rousers. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
I recount the story to 1) reveal how far I’ve traveled in these years, 2) point out that Mr. Rubin was way ahead of me here, and 3) show that the deplatforming always begins with the least defensible people and institutions and travels down the list from there. It has always been this way.
So Mr. Jones was gone, and did the public conversation improve? No, it got worse; only now, his voice was nowhere to be heard.
And Mr. Rubin was right. It began with Mr. Jones and moved eventually to scientists who disagreed with lockdowns, and pretty much every serious critic of the Biden regime. That of course included me. I’ve had countless videos removed from YouTube, something I once never imagined would happen but which now I expect as a matter of routine.
What do we see happening today? A ferocious and global war on internet freedom itself. The goal seems to be full control, and nothing short of that.
Facebook has become so stupid and throttled that I no longer bother with it. I had something like 30,000 followers and posted things that achieved a reach of a dozen or so. For a while, I had fun gaming the system by posting a puppy pic and seeing my posts soar in rankings while posting the real content in the comments. That fun lasted about five times or so before I got bored of that, too. Now, I only look at Facebook to remind myself of why I don’t look at that terrible and state-controlled platform, which I only keep to use its Marketplace because it oddly remains the best around.
As for Mr. Jones, Elon Musk brought him back on Twitter, now X. Mr. Musk also brought back all the canceled scientists, lockdown dissidents, debunkers of Russiagate, Trump fans, and so on. Since Mr. Jones has been back, he has obtained new prominence. He has been on Tucker Carlson and has gained new respect. I’ve started to listen to him in new ways.
And you know what? As it turns out, he was right before his time. I didn’t see it then. Maybe I didn’t want to see it. Probably he was saying things I didn’t want to face. Back in those days, I didn’t like anyone who was spreading gloom and doom because I did not share that outlook. That’s all the more reason we need people such as him to have a voice. It’s precisely because of what we are unwilling to see that we need people out there who make us feel uncomfortable to say exactly what we don’t want to hear.
Now, I find myself in a similar situation, screaming things daily that are obvious to me but now I’m the one who faces a crowd of people who say I should stop and quit soiling the public conversation with my conspiracy theorizing and doomsaying.
Oddly, I’ve found myself in a very similar place to where Mr. Jones was in 2018, when I was unwilling to hear what he had to say. But because I, too, ended up being canceled after March 2020 (Mr. Rubin was exactly right), I’m more sensitive than ever to the cultural and political essential that is free speech.
Let’s be very clear about two points.
First, platforms have every right to control who uses them and what is allowed to be said. That is part of free speech and free enterprise. Nothing should ever interfere with that.
Second, these platforms are now making decisions in that regard under the influence of state actors, either directly from the government itself or from third parties working in-house or contracted with the platforms. In that case, their “content moderation” is not an exercise of free enterprise but rather a direct and egregious violation of the First Amendment and free speech.
There is no doubt that state actors were involved in the decision to silence Mr. Jones. I’m retrospectively embarrassed that I didn’t see it at the time. Had I, I would have been screaming about it as unjust and wrong, or so I hope.
These days, we should assume the involvement of government actors in all such decisions. The censorship industrial complex is so vast, so well funded, and so deeply involved in all social media and legacy media that we have to treat all these platforms as Russians once regarded Pravda: the voice of the regime.
The First Amendment is about three things. First, we need to be humble enough to realize that none of us knows it all and so we all benefit from an open marketplace for ideas. Second, the government is the least competent institution to manage the public mind, which is why the founders gave us the First Amendment. Third, speaking and writing within established legal frameworks are human rights that need protection from violent suppression.
As it turns out, letting Mr. Jones speak didn’t ruin public life. It has enriched it, even if we disagree. We have to be grateful to the platform X for daring to let him spread his influence as he sees fit. It’s one of the few mainstream platforms around that still allows that. We should also use the right to speak so long as it still survives, which might not be for much longer.
