Conspiracy theories: A theory
EMILE Heskey was a striker for Liverpool FC, who hit a poor run of form. When eventually he managed to score a goal, a caption on the screen said that this was his first goal in, say, 20 matches — I don’t recall the exact number, but I recall thinking that if I were Heskey, I’d question the wisdom of scoring at all, if it merely reminds everyone that it had been ages since you last did it.
So I identified this thing called the Heskey Dilemma, which comes into play when you achieve something which only draws attention to the fact that you should be achieving a lot more.
Last week, when Facebook and YouTube followed Apple in barring the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his broadcast network Infowars, it struck me that here was the Heskey Dilemma writ large. We are tempted to praise these monstrous entities when they take out the Alex Joneses of this world, when in truth the main issue we should be addressing, is why the hell did it take them so long?
Jones has put it about that the Sandy Hook school killings were a liberal invention, that members of the Democratic Party were involved in some paedophile business operating out of a pizza parlour, and, of course, that Obama was not born in America. And yet it was only last week that Apple finally banned him for “hate speech”, followed by Facebook and YouTube, who barred him apparently because Apple had barred him.
Twitter, meanwhile, refused to be rushed into any such draconian measures, which at least showed a weird kind of consistency and a heightened awareness of the importance of the Heskey Dilemma.
And then the “old” media, such as Channel 4 News and this column, gets to decide what it all means. To provide a kind of post-match analysis of this horrible game. Indeed it was Channel 4’s Dispatches which recently nailed Facebook for the poor quality of its “content moderation”, so the C4 News seemed like the… ah… right platform for this particular content.
Always with such items there is this sense that the object of the discussion, the “tech giants”, are not of this world, but of a much bigger and more powerful world which at any moment is capable of devouring our helpless little one — but in the meantime we are allowed to talk about them, because we can’t think of anything else to do.
So an interesting case was made that free speech is indeed so vital, you can’t have the lords of Silicon Valley presiding over it, even when it is demonstrably vile, which has the downside of giving free rein to said lords, because they are so terrible, they can’t be trusted to exercise any kind of decent editorial control.
There was also an excellent contribution from a former Facebook employee who identified the problem as one of “liability”. Basically if he were to say something wrong on the Channel 4 News, they might both be spending time with their lawyers, and with other people’s lawyers, whereas it seems beyond human ingenuity to hold “the internet” to the same standards of accountability which are routinely demanded of, say, a freesheet in Navan.
Personally I would add another reason for cracking down on Alex Jones and other such pedlars of paranoid junk — they are giving the very concept of the Conspiracy Theory a bad name, which is good news for those who are actively engaged in real-world conspiracies, of whom there are many.
Yes the Alex Jones brand of Conspiracy Theory brings the whole game into disrepute, making sensible people feel wary even of the most obvious conspiracy — in some cases they have even stopped using that word, preferring “collusion”.
I should add in the spirit of “old media” courtesy that Emile Heskey has 90,000 followers on Twitter — mercifully there was no Twitter when he was playing. He always seemed like a decent fellow, and I thank him for his contribution.