Hey, you know how every bus shelter has Facebook mea culpa ads at the moment saying that they’re now taking an active interest in combatting “fake news”?
Well, there’s been a sign that they are following through, along with other other online services who have hitherto been disinclined to police the content for which they provide a forum.
And they’ve started with fruit so low hanging it’s basically rotting on the ground: Alex Jones.
Dignity. Quiet dignity.
The name may not be familiar to Australian audiences but he’s the shouty, apoplectic face of American conspiracy theory, with particular focus on the Deep State that are truly running the world – despite it being horrifyingly clear that no-one is running a damn thing.
He’d been regarded as a largely harmless crank, running his website Infowars which morphed from being yet another 9-11 conspiracy zone to a more sinister mix of peddling white genocide conspiracies and selling useless supplements and survivalist gear. It’s the equivalent of Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP reimagined for racists that think space aliens live and work among us.
His branded jade eggs are similarly uncomfortable.
He went into full mark-overstepping territory with his assertions that school shootings – most notably the horrific 2012 murder of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School – are “false flag” operations staged by “crisis actors” who stage these things as ways of passing gun control laws.
Thanks to Jones the grieving parents were harassed by “truthers” who insisted their children never existed and that they were in league with the One World government. Many have been forced to move and three parents have filed defamation actions against Jones for claims he made about them, and it’s likely that others will follow.
Apple were the first to decide that inciting crowds of listeners to call upon the parents of murdered children and tell them that they’re liars was enough, and has wiped most of the Infowars podcasts off their service (although the app still appears to be available), with Facebook, Spotify and – most damaging of all – YouTube also pruning his more barking claims from their platform.
We… we don’t know what’s going on here.
Of course, years spent fighting against imagined repression has meant that Jones and team are more than ready to insist they they’re the victims of a heavy handed conspiracy against them.
“This is the modern day electronic equivalent of book burning,” a post on the Infowars site reads. “This is throwing dissidents in the Big Tech gulag because their voices were becoming too loud and having too much influence. This is the purge. This is election meddling and COLLUSION.”
Of course, given the tenor of the current discussion over the National Energy Guarantee and the feelings of certain elements of the Coalition regarding the cleanliness of coal, truly doing something about fake news might involve an awkward amount of censorship of current Australia government policy.
Still: baby steps.