First, the news. Yesterday Twitter remained the last popular platform from which the American blogger, radio host and many others Alex Jones were not erased.
The "Erase Jones" marathon, which began in late July with the deletion of his Infowars videos from YouTube, has turned into a massive volunteer campaign. The YouTube ban was followed by a Facebook ban and the removal of Jones' podcasts from Stitcher Radio, Spotify, and Apple.
Twitter, we repeat, while holding on - for which the press is harshly pressing it.
… What is important to note here.
The 44-year-old Jones himself is a deeply exotic person. This is almost a caricature American "alternative right". He exposes, along with the machinations of Democrats, media empires and corporations, the "moon conspiracy" and the harmful vaccinations that poison Americans. His strong point is a variety of conspiracy theories, including outrageous (after the shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012, he suggested that the tragedy was partly staged).
That is, with all the dislike for the semi-official American discourse, it is extremely difficult to declare Jones the source of the True Truth. It is rather a character of their folk bestiary, a funny mediatheater, in which, until recently, black LGBT radicals and White Right Exposers of conspiracies got along, desperately hating each other.
But with all this legally (and Americans understand something in the law and litigation) Jones was all these years within the framework of the legislation on freedom of expression. Lawsuits were filed against him, of course, but nothing has been heard of victories over him. In fact, this character was just a worldview - albeit in the genre of "noir paranoid thriller". Moreover, this worldview is close to many (Jones has millions of listeners and viewers, and his videos were watched a total of more than a billion times before the general ban).
American blogger and host Alex Jones / EUTERS / Lucas Jackson / File Photo.
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Moreover, Jones has been a target for the sophisticated and not very humor of opponents all these years. Leading American comedians (all Progressives and Democrats) make fun of him. He is parodied in evening satirical shows. Characters copied from it are displayed in books, films and TV series. That is, to put it simply, for years he served as a valve for the release of steam for the offended - and thus kind of played the role of a “useful marginality”.
And suddenly, the opponents lost their nerves. And Jones, a conspiracy theorist and paranoid, was operated on to remove him from reality.
The significance of this operation is difficult to overestimate - including for you and me.
Here's the whole thing. First, Jones was not banned by the government, not by the court, or even by some "special services in the interests of national security." It was multiplied by the cartel of private Internet platforms. The very ones that at the dawn of their development, 10-15 years ago, were considered tools for the final "liberation of freedom of speech."
Recall that at the beginning of the century, the emergence of social networks was regarded by the world's foremost minds as the end of the dictatorship of the "rich and powerful" over the media space. What kind of monopoly on the truth can we talk about when every citizen has the opportunity to put a camera and a microphone in front of him and start commenting on what is happening in the world from his own bell tower?
Well, it turned out that it can. It turned out that all these years the knights of free expression lived, worked and developed their "independent media" on the basis of bird rights. It turned out that if the corporations that provided them with plots decide to demolish some insolent star, then its disappearance is just a matter of a few clicks.
At the same time, there is no need for private traders to even bother with some kind of legislation. It is enough to declare that the insolent star "speaks with the language of hate" and "spreads fakes".
If we consider that in the United States, big business, in fact, is the basis of the state, then we are faced with a pure persecution of a dissident. It was only in the epic Totalitarian Regimes of the 20th century that dissidents ceased to be printed, portraits were taken in libraries and cut out of encyclopedias. And now, when the world has moved online, they are disconnected from the main information pipelines.
Secondly, let us appreciate the bitter Orwellianism of the event itself: "This paranoid is talking such nonsense about allegedly some kind of conspiracy of corporations against free speech that we corporations decided to shut him up once and for all."
This all speaks of one very sad fact - and not only for the United States. The ideologues of semi-official Democratic Values no longer believe that they can beat their opponents in fair competition. They no longer hope to have advertising billions, Robert De Niro and rap stars on their side. And without any fuss they resort to direct annihilation of competitors.
And this is possible only in one situation: the holders of Democratic Values feel themselves ideologically weak. And it is purely a matter of time before Jones' precedent becomes routine practice.
… And finally, third and foremost: by a strange coincidence, the articles and videos that we upload, view, like and distribute are also largely on YouTube, Facebook and all sorts of iTunes.
And this in our online and computerized world to the limit is a gigantic vulnerability. And if the situation develops in the same direction (and it is likely to be), then each of us will in fact become a victim of American corporate censorship.
Those who slander something into microphones in front of cameras will remember that at any moment their language will be declared a “hate speech” and all years of their work and tens / hundreds of thousands / millions of subscribers will be canceled. And those who just sit at home in front of a computer or in a trolleybus with a smartphone will receive a picture of the world, filtered and castrated in accordance with the ideas of the beautiful of some leading ideological managers from Dublin or San Francisco.
At the same time, our country has even lower chances than others, since Russia, as you know, is a source of poisonous propaganda that quietly tries to undermine American democracy. This opinion is obvious, it is shared by all decent people in San Francisco - and therefore it does not need any proof. And there will be nowhere to complain, if anything.
The conclusion from this is the most commonplace. In the era of "broken globalization" that has come, handing over the remote control from reality to strategic competitors is stupid and shortsighted.
This means that any country wishing to be independent will have to implement its own “Chinese version”. Not only with its counterparts of all major platforms, but also with its own Great Firewall. Because the time of "fair play", "free competition of opinions" and other romance has already ended: no one will honestly compete with anyone.
Victor Marakhovsky