So we’re now trusting the capitalist class, massive,
unaccountable corporations, to decide on our behalf what we may listen to and
talk about? This is the take-home message, the terrible take-home message, of
the expulsion of Alex Jones’ Infowars network from Apple, Facebook and Spotify
and of the wild whoops of delight that this summary banning generated among
so-called liberals: that people are now okay with allowing global capitalism to
govern the public sphere and to decree what is sayable and what is unsayable.
Corporate censorship, liberals’ new favourite thing – how bizarre.
We live in strange times. On one hand it is fashionable to hate
capitalism these days. No middle-class home is complete without a Naomi Klein
tome; making memes of Marx is
every twentysomething Corbynistas’ favourite pastime. But on the other hand we
seem content to trust Silicon Valley, the new
frontier in corporate power, to make moral judgements about what kind of
content people should be able to see online. Radicals and liberals declared
themselves ‘very glad’ that these business elites enforced censorship against
Jones and Infowars. We should be ‘celebrating the move’, said Vox, because ‘it represents a crucial step forward in
the fight against fake news’. Liberals for capitalist censorship! The world
just got that bit odder, and less free.
Over
the past 24 hours, Jones and much of his Infowars channel has been ‘summarily
banned’ – in the excitable words of Vox – from
Apple, Facebook, Spotify and YouTube. Initially, Facebook and YouTube had taken
only selective measures against Jones. In response to a Twitterstorm about his
presence on these platforms, they took down some of his videos. But then Apple
decided to ban Jones entirely – removing all episodes of his podcast from its
platform – and the other online giants followed suit. Or as the thrilled
liberal commentary put it: ‘The dominoes started to fall.’ Despite having
millions of subscribers, despite there being a public interest in what he has
to say, Jones has been cast out of the world of social media, which is
essentially the public square of the 21st century, on the basis that what he
says is wicked.
This is censorship. There
will of course be apologists for the corporate control of speech, on both the
left and right, who will say, ‘It’s only censorship when the government does
it!’. They are so wrong. When enormous companies that have arguably become the
facilitators of public debate expel someone and his ideas because they find
them morally repugnant, that is censorship.
Powerful people have deprived an individual and his network of a key space in
which they might propagate their beliefs. Aka censorship.
