Facebook vs. Alex Jones: A canary in the coal mine?

He has been sued by parents of some of the 20 children killed in a December 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., over his claims the shooting was staged and the parents were actors. And years before, in July 2002, he wrote a book linking the Bush administration to what he said was a conspiracy behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Now that he’s paying a price, with technology and social media firms from Apple to Facebook and YouTube removing some of his videos, posts and digital pages from their platforms for hate speech, bullying and glorification of violence, he wants Trump — whom he supports — to intervene on his behalf.

“They’ve won the battle, but they’re going to lose the war if you, with your vision, continue to take action and to make free speech and this Internet antitrust garbage the No. 1 issue and move against them now,” Jones said in a video appealing directly to the White House and citing the approaching November congressional elections. “If you don’t, they are going to steal the mid-terms.”

While Jones’ claims of persecution by what he describes as a cabal of mainstream media companies, leftist Democrats and liberal Silicon Valley tech companies aren’t new, they’re pouring fuel onto an already fiery debate about the role of technology in 21st century American life and discourse.

At the heart of that conversation are revelations that Russian agents used Facebook and other social media platforms to influence and agitate U.S. voters in the 2016 presidential campaign, where Trump won an unexpected victory against former Democratic Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

As a result, Menlo Park, Calif.-based Facebook and peers like YouTube and Twitter have built algorithms and hired staff to filter out false or misleading posts and videos, generating concern from Republican lawmakers and conservative activists that their opinions are being targeted.

Missteps such as Facebook’s seeming unsafe content from Diamond and Silk, the video-blogging Trump supporters whose real names are Lynette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, and Twitter’s temporary lock on conservative commentator Candace Owens’ account after she remarked on old posts by a New York Times columnist only heightened that perception.

“Nobody has a right to censor my free speech,” Hardaway told the House Judiciary Committee during a raucous hearing in April. “Nobody has a right to do it, and to maliciously and deliberately do it is what really irritates me.”

Under U.S. law, however, Hardaway’s constitutional right to free speech was never in jeopardy. The First Amendment bars Congress from restricting freedom of speech or the press, but it sets no such limits on publishers in particular or private companies in general. And businesses, through most of U.S. history, haven’t guaranteed everyone the right to print opinions in their newspapers and magazines or speak on their television stations.

The New York Times “doesn’t believe everyone has a free speech right to comment on its platform, but the free speech values are far more ingrained in the ethos of online social companies that feel they’re the new public square,” said Ari Waldman, a New York Law School professor who testified during the same hearing as Diamond and Silk.

That open-operating model has contributed to “the worst corners of the Internet today,” he said in an interview. Some of those corners are ones to which Jones’ critics say he gleefully caters, and both liberals and conservatives alike acknowledge that he’s a flawed messenger for the argument that voices on the right are treated unfairly.

Progressives, who typically support claims made under the First Amendment because it protects political dissent, found themselves in a similar quandary decades ago, when televangelist Jerry Falwell sued pornographic magazine Hustler and founder Larry Flynt over a November 1983 parody that depicted him describing a sexual encounter with his mother in an outhouse.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice William Rehnquist found unanimously in Hustler’s favor, noting that the piece was labeled as parody and fiction and tossing out an award of $150,000 in damages.

“Despite their sometimes caustic nature, from the early cartoon portraying George Washington as an ass down to the present day, graphic depictions and satirical cartoons have played a prominent role in public and political debate,” Rehnquist wrote in a 1988 ruling. “The caricature of [Falwell] and his mother published in Hustler is at best a distant cousin of the political cartoons described above, and a rather poor relation at that. If it were possible by laying down a principled standard to separate the one from the other, public discourse would probably suffer little or no harm. But we doubt that there is any such standard.”

Whether the same philosophy would apply to Jones is irrelevant, since no branch of the government is involved in the decisions. “No one has a free speech right to a private company amplifying their voice,” Waldman said, though tech companies behaving as though their platforms are public squares muddles the fact.

Since their businesses aren’t covered by laws protecting public debate, he said, they’re actually “free to govern their environment however they see fit.”

Jones’ Infowars itself acknowledges that much. Remember, the website warns users in an extensive list of usage terms, you’re a guest: It’s not censorship if you break our rules and we delete your posts. Neither Jones nor Infowars responded to a request for comment.

But limiting information flow, no matter how disagreeable, may not be the answer, said Eric Yaverbaum, the chief executive officer of New York-based Ericho Communications. With 35 years in marketing and public relations, he’s a liberal Democrat who has appeared frequently on the Fox News segment “Tech Take.”

He has also visited the homes of relatives of the Sandy Hook victims and disagrees profoundly with Jones’ comments.

“I hope you quote me saying, ‘he’s an idiot,’ because I’m allowed to do that that, and therein lies the problem,” Yaverbaum explained. “It would be pompous and presumptuous to say the answer is to yank him. That’s not exactly so crystal clear. Maybe in this case it is, but I actually don’t want filters on information. I don’t want your filter, I don’t want anybody’s filter. I’d like to get the straight-up facts, that’s where I’d like to start, and then decide what my opinion is.”

While Yaverbaum is personally happy to see Jones lose some of his platforms, his heart and his head are at odds.

“Someday, there will be a case study at Harvard on what we ultimately ended up doing about the macro topic, not just Jones, but everybody,” he said. “You’re living in a piece of history as it’s being made and trying to figure out the best answer.”

Jones’ loss of several of his platforms may, in fact, be a canary in a coal mine for free-speech, said Matt Braynard, former director of data and strategy for President Trump’s 2016 campaign and executive director of the nonprofit Look Ahead America.

Westboro Baptist Church, known for its slurs against gay people, Jewish people and military veterans, spotlighted similar issues, he said. When protests by Westboro members outside the Maryland funeral of Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, a Marine who died in Iraq in 2006, spurred a lawsuit by his family, a federal jury awarded them $5 million.

Five years later, in an 8-1 ruling authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court tossed out the damages for emotional distress inflicted by picketers carrying signs that read “God Hates the USA/Thank God for 9/11″ and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers.”

The choice of the church and founder Fred Phelps “to convey its views in conjunction with Matthew Snyder’s funeral made the expression of those views particularly hurtful to many, especially to Matthew’s father,” Roberts noted. “The record makes clear that the applicable legal term — ’emotional distress’ — fails to capture fully the anguish Westboro’s choice added to Mr. Snyder’s already incalculable grief. But Westboro conducted its picketing peacefully on matters of public concern at a public place adjacent to a public street.”

And public streets, the chief justice wrote, hold a “special position in terms of First Amendment protection,” with the high court repeatedly referring them to them “as the archetype of a traditional public forum.”

Facebook and YouTube aren’t public streets, at least in the physical sense of the words, and Braynard acknowledged they have a legal right to pull Jones’ content if they choose.

As corporations, “we would consider they have free speech rights,” he said, and can’t be forced to publish opinions against their will — much as “it wouldn’t necessarily be fair or constitutional or even moral to force a baker to bake a cake for a homosexual couple if he doesn’t want to.”

What the government can — and Braynard says should — do is stop purchasing services like advertising from companies like YouTube that are engaging in common-carrier services but discriminate based on political viewpoints. He noted that the federal government has already required contractors with whom it does business to conform to its policies on hiring and discrimination.

“If that was a credible threat, that would be enough to push these corporations to acknowledge, ‘Look, we’re common carriers, we’re not going to discriminate,'” he said.

In the meantime, he suspects the firms are relying on negative perceptions of Jones and Infowars to curb public outcry.

“There are lots of people who are criticizing this decision regarding Alex Jones who really don’t like Alex Jones and really are kind of having to hold their nose, but this is not an election between two candidates, this is a matter of principles,” he said. “The truth is that the reasons some of these services are able to do it is because he’s Alex Jones. He’s kind of a marginal fringe character. That’s how it starts.”