So.  What did facebook and other social media outfits just do with Alex Jones?  Answer: something a lot less than banning him.  They limited his platform in various ways.  In a sense, big whoop.

Still, it’s an odd rush, and a scary one, I’ve been noting in the Huffington Post in relation to “how they get away with it” — sly suggestions that there’s something wrong with facebook for giving “deplorables” a platform.  The demand now gets voiced by Senator Chris Murphy.  And, yes, you’re always in a quandary with some of these actors – like, to chime in suggesting a problem on this will gett you balled ino a giant loop from media matters of defenders.  It’s the whole damnable thing where you start with the statements “don’t understand, facebook and the rest can run their business as the must” as well as “and I don’t condone the content of alex jones”…

… End of conversation.  Especially since as of now, they haven’t really kicked him off — just… forced him to craft his own media ecosystem, which he already has done, and will undoubtedly still be able to do… and, so what we mostly have right now is a lot of noise from the insane Alex Jones selling himself as a martyr for fun and profit, and a lot of noise from the sedate Chris Murphy which is startling in assessing stray actors into one coherent mess of “bad”…

… Some of the conspiracies are fun — I get the feeling that the Lady Gaga — Illuminati symbolism was basically linkbait to drive up traffic —

… and it sure was cool to watch Charlie Sheen blow up like that, all high on Crystal Meth, wasn’t it?…

But then we have the ultimately ugly one — the predictable “Sandy Hook is an Inside Job” which… if they want to castigate some lines of it into “libel” and go from there on wherefore came the “ban” (such as it is), that’d make more sense… see here David French…  (We hinge on the old canard when victims become defacto “public persons” by fact of their undesired move into public life.)

But then we’re stuck on the “disinformation” and “hate speech” parts.  Judgement calls.  Even on the knee jerk “Remember Northwoods!  False flag!”  Imagine social media at the time of the JFK Assassination, America’s long favorite conspiracy parlor game.

… and the whole of 9/11 Trutherism, once upon a time considered a left – wing enterprise, (someone look this one up and tell me if Jones ever made an appearance on the Mike Malloy program)  and somewhat swirling off the sides of more legitimate anti-war commentary… to the point where a blur forms on just what it means to question an “official story”… unnerving.

To the extremes, Zuckerberg gets chided from those with the sentiment of Chris Murphy for his “Holocaust Denialism is allowed” comment.  Perfectly sound reasoning, as always needing the preface of “condemn such crap”, and I’m sure he’d just as soon police the boundaries and push it from promotional use…

But we land on “Hate speech”.   I don’t know –  I’ve heard enough rhetoric castigating the whole of anti-abortion sentiment as violence against women — plucking that issue up just because it was what Senator Ben Sasse was getting at when questioning Zuckerberg.

You use language of safety and protection earlier. We see this happening on college campuses all across the county. It’s dangerous. 40 percent of Americans under age 35 tell pollsters they think the First Amendment is dangerous because you might use your freedom to say something that hurts somebody else’s feelings. Guess what? There are some really passionately held views about the abortion issue on this panel today. Can you imagine a world where you might decide that pro-lifers are prohibited from speaking about their abortion views on content — on your platform? 

And no one’s gotten to William Borroughs.  Yet.

And, sure.  In absence for a market, something else pops up to satisfy the market — 4-chan decides even it has had enough of some of the content, so next thing we have is 8-chan.  And, nothing much really happened, really… with this one…

… except for a disconcerting comment from Senator Chris Murphy demanding a messy enterprise of the Internet be cleaned up…

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