Difference between revisions of "Alex Jones"

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Revision as of 11:51, 17 March 2020

Alex Jones is the creator and owner of the far-right news media site Infowars. He is known for his conspiracy theories and controversial ideas on politics. He is a radio host on The Alex Jones Show out of Austin, TX, which is run through the Infowars website[1]. He is popular for his ideas that the government is out to get the public, claiming terrorist attacks, such as 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombing, were inside jobs[2].


Early Life

Jones was born in Dallas, TX, in 1974. His father was a dentist and his mother was a stay-at-home mom. When he was a teenager, he moved to Austin where he joined a broadcast station called Austin Public Access[3]. He graduated high school in 1993 and became a part-time student at Austin Community College. He used his extra time to fill in for radio hosts. His conspiracy theorist ideas began with the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. He was quick to mention that the government could have played a part. He received reports of people agreeing with his conspiracies, and the praise led to his own position at a local radio station[4].


Infowars

Infowars is a well-known conspiracy news network. It reaches 3.2 million unique viewers per month in the United States and 3.9 million unique viewers per month across the globe[5].


Conspiracy Theories

Alex Jones and Infowars have reputations for producing conspiracy theories related to the government. They believe the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center were organized by the U.S. government in an effort to convince other countries to reduce freedoms granted to citizens.

Jones has stated that the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 was an inside job without giving a reason behind it.

Infowars has stated it believes the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 was carried out to deceive the public into thinking a specific group had done it.

They have also said that the Oklahoma City bombing was executed by the American government[6].


Censorship

In March of 2018, YouTube decided to take down all videos from Alex Jones’ channel. YouTube claimed the account was shut down due to a disregard for the terms of service, although the specific terms were not mentioned. Infowars related channels accumulated billions of views across more than thirty thousand videos on YouTube alone. Paul Joseph Watson, who works for Jones at Infowars, was still allowed to keep his videos up, despite representing the same ideas as Jones[7]. Apple, Facebook, and Spotify joined YouTube in erasing Infowars material on their platforms, giving “hate speech and glorifying violence” as their reasoning. Facebook specifically said that fake news was not the reason for Jones’ removal, but his racist and violent remarks toward groups broke the terms of Facebook[8]. Like YouTube, Facebook did not give specific examples posts or behaviors that led to the removal[9]. On August 29, 2019, YouTube allowed Infowars to return in the interest of sharing different viewpoints. Thirteen videos were posted before YouTube decided to remove them once more[10]. More pressure is being placed on these technology companies to only show information that is correct. In a world where finding the truth is difficult, censorship of ideas is criticized as well[11].

Major companies who share ads on YouTube removed their ads from all Infowars-related videos. Companies such as Nike, Acer, and Expedia, claimed they did not know their ads were linked to these videos and requested that YouTube take down all ads on the Alex Jones Channel[12].


Ethical Implications

Big tech companies that acted in removing and censoring content generated by Alex Jones and Infowars have been faced with heavy criticism. Conservatives have continually attacked YouTube, Facebook, Google, and others for removing conservative content on their platforms. It’s not just popular conservatives that are being affected by this. When removing an account it believes promotes hate speech, Facebook also deletes some posts of followers. It will not allow those views to be represented by anyone on Facebook[13].

Tech companies make sure that their algorithms are not leaked to anyone outside the company. Because of this, it is impossible to know for certain whether these tech companies are censoring conservatives. Many of the biggest companies have said there is no bias in their algorithms toward conservative viewpoints[14]. The big disagreement comes with discussion about the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. There is a gray area surrounding the article about freedom of speech. The First Amendment says the U.S. government cannot limit speech, but a privately owned company can prohibit whatever they want[15]. Technically, Google and Facebook are privately owned corporations. However, there are 220 million Facebook users and 259 million Google users in the United States, and if they are biased against conservatives, then those people may not be hearing both sides of the story[16][17].

References

  1. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones arrested for DWI in Texas. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/conspiracy-theorist-alex-jones-arrested-dwi-texas-69514961
  2. Alex Jones. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/alex-jones
  3. Alex Jones. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/alex-jones
  4. Zaitchik, A. (2018, June 25). Meet Alex Jones. Retrieved from https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/meet-alex-jones-175845/
  5. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20171210072444/https://www.quantcast.com/infowars.com?qcLocale=en_US#/trafficCard
  6. week, L. (n.d.). Advertisers flee InfoWars founder Alex Jones' YouTube channel. Retrieved from https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/03/technology/youtube-ads-infowars-alex-jones/index.html
  7. BBA4-HFVU: YouTube terminates an Infowars account - again ... : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/perma_cc_BBA4-HFVU
  8. Chappell, B., & Tsioulcas, A. (2018, August 6). YouTube, Apple and Facebook Ban Infowars, Which Decries 'Mega Purge'. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2018/08/06/636030043/youtube-apple-and-facebook-ban-infowars-which-decries-mega-purge
  9. week, L. (n.d.). Advertisers flee InfoWars founder Alex Jones' YouTube channel. Retrieved from https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/03/technology/youtube-ads-infowars-alex-jones/index.html
  10. Baca, M. C. (2019, August 30). Infowars returned to YouTube. It lasted less than a day. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/30/infowars-returned-youtube-it-lasted-less-than-day/
  11. Chappell, B., & Tsioulcas, A. (2018, August 6). YouTube, Apple and Facebook Ban Infowars, Which Decries 'Mega Purge'. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2018/08/06/636030043/youtube-apple-and-facebook-ban-infowars-which-decries-mega-purge
  12. week, L. (n.d.). Advertisers flee InfoWars founder Alex Jones' YouTube channel. Retrieved from https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/03/technology/youtube-ads-infowars-alex-jones/index.html
  13. Facebook bans Alex Jones and other controversial figures for hate speech. (2019, May 2). Retrieved from https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-facebook-ban-alex-jones-milo-yiannopoulos-20190502-story.html
  14. Schwartz, O. (2018, December 4). Are Google and Facebook really suppressing conservative politics? Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/04/google-facebook-anti-conservative-bias-claims
  15. Technology. (2019, June 19). Here's How Conservatives Can Defeat Big-Tech Censorship. Retrieved from https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/19/heres-conservatives-can-defeat-big-tech-censorship/
  16. Clement, J. (2019, December 2). Facebook users in U.S. Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/statistics/408971/number-of-us-facebook-users/
  17. Gordon, K. (n.d.). Topic: Google. Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/topics/1001/google/