YouTube demonetizes anybody and everybody. It’s a way to steal money from creators and keep it for themselves.
Contributory charges for encouraging crazies to actually commit crimes. Like making death threats, showing up at Comet Pizza and shooting up the place, things like that.
I see a good money making venture for you 
On the contrary, I think social media outlets like Facebook have the responsibility of banning political viewpoints that are known to be outright lies such as, for example, denying that the Holocaust actually ever happened. To not do so is to actually lend them a certain legitimacy by default.
The problem being who decides what are ‘outright lies’ or aren’t. I don’t believe in alien abduction, and while I wouldn’t call the folks who do liars, I think they are deluded. A lot of conservatives think that liberals and the liberal media lies all the time…and vice versa. IS Jones actually lying…or just a crazy deluded asshole? I honestly don’t know, though personally I think that a lot of his schtick is showmanship with the intent of milking people out of their money. But he might honestly believe the horseshit he peddles. Sure, I think Holocaust deniers are wrong, and some are certainly lying, and this would be another case where my emotions would say yeah, they should be banned (I’d certainly ban them from any site I ran, if I had the power to do so), but the problem is if it becomes a slippery slope. Who decides what is or isn’t truth or what is or isn’t a lie? There are some things that, to me are cut and dried…but I realize that what is true or false to me is going to be different than someone else. Hell, if you post on this board you see this in action pretty much every day.
No, that’s not what you said, since you didn’t use any such qualifier. You implied that Jones’ behavior was illegal, and asked whether it was a misdemeanor or a felony.
If someone harasses current Administration officials in restaurants, grocery stores, and gas stations, should Maxine Waters face “contributory charges”, whatever the heck those are?
If someone murders a journalist, should Trump?
It’s not necessarily illegal.
I suggest you read his Wikipedia entry as well as the one for InfoWars. But it’s not really Jones that is the issue. He’s just the case in point. If you think that liars should be banned do you really want to ban Trump? How about Corbyn? I think it’s better to let liars damn themselves.
More to the point:
“f you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously, OK? Just knock the hell … I promise you I will pay for the legal fees.” Trump on Feb 1, 2016
“He [a protester] is walking out with big high-fives, smiling, laughing. I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you.” Trump on Feb 22, 2016
“Get him out. Try not to hurt him. If you do, I’ll defend you in court. Don’t worry about it.” Trump on Mar 4, 2016
Then, on March 9, 2016, John Franklin McGraw sucker-punched a black man who was being escorted out of a Trump rally by police. (In typical fashion, the police tackled the victim of the crime, and let the assailant go back to his seat… though McGraw was later charged and pleaded no contest to simple assault, and apologized to his victim with a hug - cite)
So, D’Anconia, since Trump encouraged violence and the crowd responded, do you suppose Trump should face “contributory charges,” whatever the heck those are?
Let me guess what the response is going to be to this question:D’Anconia is just going to ask another poorly thought out question.
There’s definitely something to be said for treating Facebook as a public good along the lines of the telephone system. Like it or not, there is no meaningful competitor. Google+ and MySpace technically exist, but given that the value of a social network is “people I know are on that network”, and Facebook has a huge advantage because everyone is on facebook. And getting everyone to move to another platform is virtually impossible - Google tried and failed miserably, despite how massive they are and despite forcing you to sign up for Google+ if you used Gmail or Youtube.
Speaking of youtube, you kinda have the same problem there. There’s a reason we barely even think of Vimeo and Dailymotion. If I take my popular channel and move it to Vimeo, my channel will no longer be popular, because everyone uses youtube. If everyone took their channels and moved them to Vimeo, well, okay, then you could make a case, but good luck coordinating that, and anyone who moves if nobody else does is going to end up making a fool of themself and screwing up their youtube channel.
Tools like facebook, twitter, youtube, etc. essentially have no competitors within their specific niches. Sure, if you want social interaction, you can go to the Dope, or MySpace, or TotallyNotAGenericFacebookKnockoff.com, but your parents probably aren’t on TNAGFK.com, they’re probably on Facebook. Contrapoints and Arianna Grande probably aren’t on TNAGTK.com. Anyone who isn’t a horrible fucking racist probably isn’t on TNAGRK.com (god, Voat is a shitshow).
So it’s kind of a monopoly situation. As Nathan Robinson says quite often, CurrentAffairs.org relies on their reach on Facebook and Twitter to publicize their site - if they got banned, chances are good they’d be pretty fucked. There’s a reason Jones is pissed about getting banned from these services - they’re a very important part of his outreach, in a way a site like PrisonPlanet.com simply never could be.
And you can’t break up the monopoly - that defeats the whole point of social networks. If you break up facebook, the end result is just infinitely shittier facebook. So what’s left? Treating it like a utility, mostly. And, like a utility, being pretty free about what content is permissible on it.
I’m not sure what the full ramifications of this will be, but I feel it’s at least a decent starting point for an argument.
Trying to make a site usage rule (and let’s be clear, we’re talking about a self-induced and self-policed site usage rule) against liars is an exercise in folly, since there’s no way to fact-find whether somebody’s a deliberate liar or just a confused monkey.
A more defensible position would be to enact site rules against hate speech and/or incitement to violence. While a certain amount of judgement would be employed in determining where exactly the line was and what crosses it, content could be at least judged based on its content and context alone without worrying about intent. Plus there are actual countries with hate speech laws, so at least somebody thinks the stuff can be identified.
I disagree with the Facebook = pre-break-up-AT&T analogy, but let’s say it’s accurate. In the old days, if you misused your phone, AT&T could take away your line. If you needed a phone to execute your business successfully, you followed Ma Bell’s rules. If Jones needed Facebook, he should have followed their rules.
The idea that these large companies own the Internet is false. Jones is free to put up videos on his own website. He can release his show as a podcast, and host that himself. There are tons of people online who do just that.
Yes, it will cause him harm. But the mere fact that it causes him harm isn’t a reason to remedy that harm. You have to argue that there is something inherently unfair about this. But how can there be when he’s in the same situation SFDebris is in?
The solution, if they do ever get to big, is indeed breaking them up. There is no reason this would harm the platforms. They’d just need to have a way to interact with one another. Well, for social networks. For YouTube, just have different sites for different kinds of videos. Done.
The one thing we should not do is turn a private company into a public one. And these right wingers would rightly freak out over that. They would also freak out at these companies losing their freedom of speech.
Of course, the people who argue this also tend to be the people who argue for restrictions on protesters, on college students, on various liberal “SJWs” and the like. But my counterargument doesn’t rest on that. The idea is not a good one. There is one solution if there is a full on monopoly, and that is breaking up that monopoly.
Jones’s fans can still watch him same as they always did. And, if his show is good, they can spread it by word of mouth, or paid advertising. Facebook et al don’t have to contribute their money into helping him.
I don’t doubt any of that, and I intended to direct my objection at the folks you defined as “(actual) conservative friends and relatives” rather than at you personally.
I do think that a lot of folks who today call themselves conservative aren’t, at least by any reasonable definition of the term. It was the word ‘actual’ that inspired my concern, and you didn’t direct that word at yourself. (If you originally intended that phrasing as an ironic way to refer to yourself I entirely missed it…)
No. A legal charge of incitement requires an imminent threat. See Brandenburg v. Ohio.
What crime is being committed?
I’m not sure why. It so happen that it’s a guy you really don’t like, but it could be anybody whose presence on a social media is causing PR issues hence threatens the company’s profits. For instance, say, someone you like criticizes China, and it raises the ire of the local nationalists, makes the headlines in China, etc… To placate its Chinese customer base, the social media bans him.
That said, I have difficulties justifying why they should be prevented from deciding what can be said or not on their platform. Facebook has become so universal that it seems that a lot of people, businesses, institutions… are more or less “obligated” to use it and to abide by their rules (for instance a museum that disagrees strongly with their stance on nudity still has to maintain an active presence. An event organizer cannot not use it and stay in business. In many families, it’s viewed as almost indispensable to stay in touch…), so it’s a bit of a problem : it’s becoming close to a kind of public service. But it’s still a service that nobody is actually required to use, and besides there’s no reason to assume that the facebook era will last forever. It could have mostly fallen in disuse in ten years replaced by whatever else will be popular then.
Oh yeah - as I mentioned upthread, Jones is a terrible starting point for this discussion, because he’s just pretty much the fucking worst. Regardless of anyone else’s free speech, when you lead a 5-year-long harassment campaign targeting the parents of murder victims, you don’t belong on the internet. You don’t belong in polite society. You belong chained to a wall and hidden behind brickwork.
Sure. But if, say, Google, Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter ban you, your outreach is severely hampered. If you make video content for a living and Youtube decides they don’t want you on their service, your career is basically over. It’s a matter of reaching people.
…But again, this goes back to “why use Facebook instead of Google+”. And the entire reason you use a social network is to reach out to people. If you split that up, that outreach is severely limited. If you chop Facebook into 100 smaller sites, it is fundamentally a very different experience. If your twitter clone has 40,000 people instead of millions and is missing most of the major players on twitter, you don’t have twitter, you have something fundamentally different (and probably more racist).
Maybe chill on the pigeonholing a lil’ bit?