Ben Shapiro agrees with the recent decision by tech giants to ban conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his site, Infowars, from their platforms. However, he argues that the primary justification for doing so (hate speech) is misguided. Shapiro finds that the platforms should have banned Jones primarily for mis- and disinformation, saying that the failure to do so only inflames conservatives and makes Jones more defensible in right-leaning circles.
I’m far more concerned with social-media arbiters suddenly deciding that vague “hate speech” standards ought to govern our common spaces than I am with the daily dose of detritus distributed by this delirious dunce. Social-media giants had a choice here. If they wanted Jones gone, they could simply have defined a standard limit on the number of debunked conspiracy theories one could peddle on the site before being banned, or they could have created a standard prohibiting public threats.
Instead, they chose the most politically correct way of booting Jones: They claimed he’d violated undefined standards regarding “hate.” That’s why so many on the right are rushing to Jones’s defense — not because they like Jones or anything he stands for, but because the Left is happy to apply double standards under the rubric of “anti-hate measures.”
[…]Is it any wonder, then, that conservatives don’t trust social-media hall monitors to apply their alleged rules with equal vigilance? It’s demonstrative of the echo chamber that is Silicon Valley that rather than going after Jones on some semblance of an objective standard, they went directly for the buzzwords that will be most popular among those who love Sarah Jeong.
Source: Alex Jones Infowars Social-Media Ban: What Facebook, Apple, YouTube Did Wrong | National Review