I’ve never listened to an InfoWars podcast, so I don’t know what I’m missing. But from what I gather Alex is an entertaining quack who is ultimately harmless except in the sense that his message is subversive to the “wrong” groups. We’ve come a bit further along the slope from banning Daily Stormer now haven’t we?
The more interesting contrast which I’ve been watching the last few days is between how NYT handled Quinn Norton’s firing for old tweets which actually used banned words in an positive context versus NYT claiming hundreds of racists tweets by Sarah Jeong amount to the same thing and now that’s a reason not to fire her.
I don’t know anything at all about Jeong, other than some highly... erm... problematic old tweets. I knew a bit about Quinn and was very disappointed to see her fired for what I thought were highly misconstrued old tweets... but I think the contrast between how they were each handled really demonstrates how poorly companies tend to handle these matters, and specifically how much it matters which group is apparently being slighted.
And so it all just makes me wonder. When we selectively censor or fire people for specific views, when these views dont actually cross red lines into illegal speech (inciting to violence), how the decision really comes down to a political one. Companies are of course free to make political choices about who works for them or what content they host, but they’re only lying to themselves if they think it’s about morales or ethics.
Various campaigns have been trying to downrank, delist, or demonetize sites like InfoWars or Breitbart. This is no doubt a form of asymmetric information warfare trying to limit the audience for contrary messages. Personally I find the drive toward censorship all extremely concerning.