One of the downstream effects of Trumpism is that the fact of having a President Trump has given conservatives a hair-trigger on defending every marginal figure, no matter how stupid or malicious. It’s easy to understand why: Trump is close to these people in form and substance, so allowing them to be attacked can be seen as a proxy argument against Trump. No conservatives would have felt duty-bound to defend Milo Yiannopoulos had Mitt Romney been president.
But we are where we are, so various conservatives have risen to defend Alex Jones in the wake of Facebook, YouTube, and Apple kicking him off of their platforms. Their defenses come across three vectors, each of which is flawed.
(1) It’s a First Amendment issue. Let’s dispense with this one off the top: No, it’s not. And conservatives used to understand the difference between having the right to say something and having the right to say something without consequences.
None of the tech companies that have de-platformed Jones are impinging on his right to speech. He can still record and disseminate podcasts and videos. He can still publish whatever conspiracy theories he wants. No one is threatening him with violence or jail or a fine or denying him a license to carry on as he pleases. No arm of government touches this case in any way.
All that is happening is that privately owned companies are declining to allow him to use their resources to broadcast his speech. There is no First Amendment case—none at all.
(2) It’s an equal-access issue. You might recall a couple months ago when conservatives celebrated the Masterpiece Cake Shop decision. (Rightly, in my view.) The nub of their argument was that privately held businesses ought to be allowed to refuse certain kinds of services to certain customers, provided that (1) the refusal was based on reasonable, non-discriminatory grounds and that (2) the person being refused had reasonable recourse to an alternative remedy.
That’s precisely what has happened here. Jones is being denied access based on his behavior and actions, not who or what he is. And he has an enormous, obvious, and reasonable remedy: The Internet.
Alex Jones has his own website. On it, he can publish anything he likes. He can post videos and offer podcasts. He can send out newsletters. People who want Alex Jones can get all the Alex Jones they can handle with about half a second of effort and no additional barriers. And this isn’t like a newspaper telling Jones that he’s free to buy his own printing presses and start his own paper: The total bill for publishing all of this stuff will be in the range of a several hundred dollars a year.
The platforms we’re talking about here—Facebook, YouTube, and iTunes podcasts—are nothing like public utilities. There are plenty of alternative channels and then there’s the giant World Wide Web itself, with all of the intertubes in it.
There is one case that you can envision where the utility/equal-access argument might hold: If Google decided that they were going to ban Alex Jones from search results, then Jones defenders might have a point. Google is so dominant, and search is such a core function, that it could reasonably be viewed almost as the doorway to the internet. You could make a very good case that Google Search functions like a utility.
But that’s not what we’re talking about here and even looking at Google Search in this way highlights the degree to which the entities in question are nothing like utilities.
(3) The ban is imperfect. Have you seen all of the conservatives asking “What about Farrakhan?” There are a ton of bad users out on the tech industry’s leading platforms. But saying that these platforms shouldn’t ban Alex Jones because they haven’t banned all of the bad actors is like saying that the DA shouldn’t prosecute one criminal because the police haven’t caught every other criminal.
The answer here is obvious: Tech companies shouldn’t give Jones a pass; they should get rid of the Farrakhans of the world, too. The perfect should not be the enemy of the good.
Conservatives who worry about the slippery slope ought to wait until we get to a part that’s actually slippery. There is nothing about Alex Jones—nothing—that would allow him to be confused with a reasonably responsible, good-faith actor. This isn’t a hard case. If you have even minimum community standards for decency, you can draw a line here.
The real question is whether or not you believe that tech companies should be allowed to impose any standards on their platforms. YouTube doesn’t allow pornography. Is that okay? Facebook doesn’t seem to allow the Daily Stormer to have a page. Does that make Facebook a worse experience for the average user?
On the base question of whether or not private companies have the right to establish some minimum standards of decency on their platforms, the conservative response has almost always been, “Yes.” (I suspect the overlap between groups that insist that Facebook must allow Alex Jones on the platform and also insist that NFL should force players to stand during the national anthem is almost 100 percent.)
But I’d go even further: The conservative view isn’t just that communities have the right to create standards—we have always believed that there is wisdom and virtue in doing so. If we didn’t, then we’d be libertarians.
There may come a time when tech companies make a bad decision regarding who they allow to use their platforms. But this isn’t that.
Maybe you think that the public square the internet has created over the last decade is healthy and optimal. If so, then banning Alex Jones is a bad idea. But if you look around online communities and think that they can, and should, be better—then the real problem is that tech companies haven’t gone far enough.
