Report: Zuckerberg Directly Involved In Decision to Ban Alex Jones

According to a report in the New York Times, Mark Zuckerberg was directly involved in the actions that banned radio host Alex Jones and Infowars from Facebook.

The report, which cites two sources involved in Facebook’s handling of the accounts, explains that Zuckerberg was in lengthy discussion with company CEO’s over Jones’ presence on the network.

The situation was volatile enough that Mr. Zuckerberg got personally engaged, according to two people involved in Facebook’s handling of the accounts. He discussed Infowars at length with other executives, and mused privately about whether Mr. Jones — who once called Mr. Zuckerberg a “genetic-engineered psychopath” in a video — was purposefully trying to get kicked off the platform to gain attention, they said.
Mr. Zuckerberg, an engineer by training and temperament, has always preferred narrow process decisions to broad, subjective judgments. His evaluation of Infowars took the form of a series of technical policy questions. They included whether the mass-reporting of Infowars posts constituted coordinated “brigading,” a tactic common in online harassment campaigns. Executives also debated whether Mr. Jones should receive a “strike” for each post containing hate speech (which would lead to removing his pages as well as the individual posts) or a single, collective strike (which would remove the posts, but leave his pages up).

The report notes that it was Apple’s decision to remove multiple Infowars podcasts from iTunes that gave Zuckerberg the personal go-ahead to take down Jones’ pages.

Late Sunday, Apple — which has often tried to stake out moral high ground on contentious debates — removed Infowars podcasts from iTunes. After seeing the news, Mr. Zuckerberg sent a note to his team confirming his own decision: the strikes against Infowars and Mr. Jones would count individually, and the pages would come down. The announcement arrived at 3 a.m. Pacific time.

Zuckerberg supposed suspicion that Jones was setting up a type of false flag scenario where he would intentionally get himself kicked off Facebook to bring attention to his platform does not add up considering that multiple platforms, including Apple, Spotify, MailChimp, YouTube, and many more, all swept Jones off within a relatively close time frame.

Infowars Editor Paul Joseph Watson has claimed that Infowars was never given a specific video, statement or piece of content that violated the rules of any of the companies that banned them.

“An electronic lynch mob pressured all these companies to cave to partisan outrage, and they gleefully complied,” Watson wrote.

“This isn’t just “private companies” exercising their right to ban users, this is monolithic corporations, the biggest of which yield more power than most national governments working in tandem with the deep state and the media-industrial complex to crush dissent,” he continued.

And as Breitbart’s Allum Bokhari notes, the New York Times report that suggests Zuckerberg was directly involved in censoring Infowars is full of contradictions.

The rest of the Times’ article is a flurry of contradictions. It simultaneously calls fears of censorship “overblown” while acknowledging that users of the platforms must now “tip-toe around” controversial topics to avoid being banned. At the same time, the piece grudgingly admits that “both fans and critics of Infowars can probably agree that a system in which one executive can decide to shut off a news organization’s access to a large portion of its audience is hardly ideal.”

When it comes down to it, the censorship of Jones by the likes of Facebook and YouTube is right in line with these companies morals.

In 2016, Facebook and Google’s YouTube – along with Twitter and Microsoft – all voluntarily signed onto an agreement with the EU to crack down on what it classifies as “illegal hate speech” while “criminaliz[ing]” perpetrators and “promoting independent counter-narratives” that the European Union favors.

This type of subjective hate speech policy enforcement has led to dozens of arrests across the EU for “xenophobic” and Islam-critical Facebook posts.

Also, Google has announced that it would provide China with a government-censored search engine, according to leaked documents reported by The Intercept. The move has caused some of the company’s employees to protest the decision.