Alex Jones is Getting Sued and You’re Getting Screwed
The fallout from this lawsuit will ruin freedom of expression the same way the DMCA ruined Fair Use.
Despite the fact that the media fuels mass panics and arbitrarily destroys lives in pursuit of ratings, I’m convinced we’re not protecting The Press enough. We’ve done a lot to protect the content of speech but too little to protect the platforms people use to exchange ideas. Most of the controversy over Alex Jone’s recent misfortune has centered on whether or not the content of his speech deserved to be censored. The real question is, who is legally responsible for the content? Jones? Or Jones plus the platforms he uses?
The people who dislike Alex’s audience say it’s reasonable to censor the content, The people who sympathize with his audience say that “there ought to be a law” to prevent this kind of censorship. The truth is that Jones wasn’t censored, he was taken down as part of a corporate risk management strategy. Alex and the platforms that banded him are both doing something clearly wrong but probably not quite illegal. To me censoring Jones feels wrong, but makes sense given the ambiguity of the law. Regulation that prevent media platforms from arbitrarily censoring content, would protect platforms from liability by giving them an excuse to wait for the outcome of litigation before removing content. In the current situation, platforms are forced to respond to libel suits the way they respond to DMCA notices: Taking the content down with no questions asked.
Jones isn’t being censored because of a media conspiracy to suppress his thoughts. The platforms are structured to make money according to how many views their content creators get. Jones’s popular content was a net asset to YouTube, Soundcloud, and Facebook. The trouble is that the Platforms have no clear limitation of liability for the contents of the content they host, and Alex Jones is in the process of getting his pants sued off. A court will decide whether or not what Jones said is defamatory, and also what category of speech it is: satire, entertainment, pornography, journalism, ect. Platforms like Soundcloud and Facebook have deep pockets and poor public images, the last thing they want is to get sued by the Sandy Hook survivors or of Jones’s other enemies. If this lawsuit is successful I’m sure other things that Jones has said will turn out to be actionable as well. Cowardice on the part of the powerful often looks Machiavellian, but in this case we can relax. There is no Tech-Giant/Old Media conspiracy.
Facebook share holders lost 120 Billion dollars last week. This was kind of amusing to me since I associate Mark Zuckerburg with his unsympathetic portrayal by Jesse Eisenberg. In fact, it’s a travesty for thousand of people, and the start of a very bad trend. Instead of growing, social media platform are going to contract as they continue to divert their resources towards finding ways to prevent people from using them. They’ve panicked in the face of accusations, and started taking content down unfairly just as they have with DMCA related copy-write claims. Artistic freedom, and free expression of ideas, won’t mean any more to YouTube or Facebook than fair use does, as long as the companies are unsure of their exposure to legal risks.
