Banished: the crackpot who thinks 9/11 was an inside job

The most famous conspiracy theorist in America is probably its current president, said Adrienne Lafrance in The Atlantic, but there’s a close runner-up: Alex Jones. The radio show host and founder of the Infowars media platform has peddled all sorts of mad ideas over the years. His theories include: that the Moon landings were faked; that 9/11 was an inside job; that Hillary Clinton ran a paedophile ring; and that the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was a hoax perpetrated by gun-control activists. He has won a devoted following and praise from Donald Trump. (“Your reputation is amazing,” Trump told him in an Infowars appearance in 2015. “I will not let you down.”) But Jones is going to find it harder to spread his paranoid world view from now on. Last week, Apple, Facebook, Vimeo and Youtube, which have come under increasing pressure to act, banished the vast bulk of Jones’s content from their sites.

Cue noisy accusations of censorship, said Christine Emba in The Washington Post. But it’s nonsense to portray this as an assault on free speech. Jones’s fans can still access his stuff on the Infowars site (and on Twitter, for now); other media platforms have no obligation to help him spread the word. Jones’s “conspiracy-mongering” causes real public harm. Parents of pupils killed at Sandy Hook have been prevented from visiting their children’s graves and even forced to move house as a result of being hounded by Infowars-inspired nutters. Last week’s move by the big tech firms should be seen as part of a democratic backlash, said Jeff Jarvis in The Atlantic. “Civilisation is winning, at last.”

Jones is a poisonous figure, said David Harsanyi in The Federalist, but critics are right to harbour concerns about him being shut out of the public square. The cited justification for it – hate speech – is worryingly subjective. “Conflating partisan Republican positions with hate speech or intolerable ideas has been a long-standing strategy on the Left.” Tech firms should instead use the principles of libel law to decide whether to ban people, said David French in The New York Times. Proving that someone is lying with malign intent may be a “high bar”, but at least that bar “respects the marketplace of ideas, avoids the politically charged battle over ever-shifting norms in language and culture, and provides protection for aggrieved parties”.