Friday, August 10, 2018

Asif Aziz — It’s Not a ‘Defense’ of Alex Jones to Argue That We’re On a Slippery Slope of Internet Censorship

When you hound the parents of dead children and promote the theory that inter-dimensional “lizard people” are secretly running the world, you relinquish the right to be taken seriously by a lot of people.
But this is not about Alex Jones or what he believes. It is about the fact that the Left has willfully decided that massive corporations, working hand-in-glove with government agencies, as we know they do, should be the arbiters of truth and should hold the power to decide what we see, hear, read and believe.
Left? Or corporate shills trying desperately to control the narrative? Certainly, many on the so-called left but actually center-right on world standards have been co-opted by the Democratic established going by the name New Democrats and Theory Way, but which is really the political machine working in the interests of the donors.
This neo-McCarthyism has been steadily creeping back into the mainstream for years, but gathered steam with the election of Donald Trump and the onset of Russiagate, which has gripped American political discourse now for the better part of two years. Once-skeptical “liberals”are suddenly in thrall to the benevolent “intelligence community” and are more than happy to brand as a traitor to America anyone who questions its power and innate goodness.
The qestion is, Who decides?
Those cheering Jones’ collective banning at the hands of all-powerful digital overlords should ask themselves a few questions.
Do you really want tech giants, working with governments, to be the ones deciding what constitutes “fake” news? Who gets to decide what a conspiracy theory is? Who gets to decide when something is “real”journalism or when it sows “radical discontent” and “division” and should be banned or labelled as dangerous and divisive hate speech?
To suggest that the “slippery slope” argument doesn’t hold water and that Alex Jones is a unique case is to be blind to reality.…
"First they came for Alex Jones.…"
Some on the progressive left have opposed this creeping censorship, cognizant of the fact that it leads to nowhere healthy, but others have cheered along, perhaps under the naive and totally false assumption that only the right-wing will feel the sting.
Well, they shouldn’t feel so comfortable. Google has already been accused of censoring left-wing and socialist websites. Sites like Alternet, Democracy Now and Counterpunch all experienced huge drops in trafficsince Google changed its algorithms to combat “fake news” online....
 Astute News — Opinion
It’s Not a ‘Defense’ of Alex Jones to Argue That We’re On a Slippery Slope of Internet Censorship
Asif Aziz

1 comment:

Peter Pan said...

No laws were broken. If you have a problem with the AJ takedown, change the laws.