Alex Jones and the Double Edged Sword of Capitalist Platforms
Recently, right wing conspiracy pundit and supplement promoter Alex Jones had the majority of his content and that of his brand Info Wars taken down from major capitalist media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and Spotify. While most of these companies listed their reasoning for the takedowns as related to some moralistic claim of “not tolerating hate speech” the takedowns came quick on the heels of defamation lawsuits filed by parents of victims of school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The parents lawsuits’ implicated these media hosting sites as partially responsible for promoting Alex Jones’s special brand of infotainment and the sites responded almost in unison in an effort to cash in on the cheap goodwill while capitalizing on the opportunity to claim greater responsibility (and therein, power) over the content hosted on their websites that is posted by amateur users and professional news organizations. While the removal of Info Wars and Alex Jones’s content may not particularly cause any distress amongst generally left-leaning crowds, this moment has lead to the simultaneous takedowns of numerous other outlets that are sympathetic to or overtly support an anti-capitalist agenda.
Image from John Minchillo - AP
In the United States the election of Donald Trump as President has brought up numerous allegations of meddling by foreign states that ranges from accusations of vote-tampering, to peddling “fake news” propaganda, to complex webs of buyouts and blackmail. In this worrisome environment Americans have become exceptionally prone to the xenophobic patriotism that leads them to fear work by anyone other than the hand that keeps them needing feeding. Due to this tenuous situation, journalists and reporters who have been blackballed by American media and resort to reporting for Russia Today, TeleSur, Al Jazeera, or other established but likewise problematic outlets.
Image from LC
Amongst these journalists are Abby Martin (TeleSur) and Chris Hedges (Russia Today). Martin and Hedges each offer a unique take on the American Empire that is critical while also containing the personal touches of writers whose work has been personally attacked by the governments that ironically claim to exist as the last bastions of freedom for their work. TeleSur’s English language Facebook channel was removed shortly before being reinstated, with the claim that Facebook’s removal was an “error.” Whether or not TeleSur’s webpage was removed because of misplaced anger of a Facebook user who reported the page or Facebook’s news-accrediting team purposefully removed the site to increase pressure on the media team’s self-censorship to nudge the leftist outlet into a more capitalist-friendly neutral zone, it is clear that the strategy works to silence radical viewpoints.
Image from Abby Martin on The Ring of Fire Network
Though TeleSur’s English language Facebook page was restored (with Facebook claiming that the removal was for violating Facebook’s “Terms of Service” without pointing to any specific rule broken), TeleSur is based in Caracas, Venezuela with major funding coming from Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Uruguay; it is therefore the subject of crippling sanctions by the United States that prevent it from paying its foreign based journalists, as well as receiving funds from countries other than Venezuela. The precarious situation this leaves the news organization and its journalists in is an aggressive form of economic censorship that supports the same conclusion as the institutional barriers to operating on a capitalist platform. The only solution to this problem is for journalists and independent news organizations to migrate away from mainstream capitalist platforms and onto independent hosting or mirroring sites that allow for more autonomy over their own programming and their ability to deliver needed content to their users.