(2018-11-19) Tufekci He Who Must Not Be Named What Infowars Alex Jones And Voldemort Have In Common

Zeynep Tufekci: 'He Who Must Not Be Named': What Infowars' Alex Jones and Voldemort Have in Common. Jones is a kind of real-world Voldemort. Speak his name to condemn his conspiracy theories and you draw more attention to his hateful ideas. It’s like fighting fire with oxygen tanks instead of fire extinguishers

This is attention-gaming, and Jones excels at it. At the hearings, Jones sat behind Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey as they testified, streaming the action from his phone. He heckled Marco Rubio as the senator talked to reporters. His stunts blew up online and got him into The New York Times.

Jones has been spreading his rage-fueled disinformation for a while, but I have rarely written about him publicly. With the exception of three tweets among tens of thousands I’ve posted, I haven’t referred to Jones by name on Twitter. He was “you know who” to me. This was a deliberate decision; I knew that he counted on his critics to amplify his message. I didn’t want to broaden the reach of his curse. So why am I naming him now? That fuss Jones made at the Capitol was a last gasp. He’d just been banned from YouTube, Facebook, Apple, and Spotify. Soon after, he was also banned from Twitter. He’d been deplatformed. Now that his Voldemort-like powers have vanished, it’s not just possible to discuss Jones—it’s necessary.

Yet while I’m happy that Jones has lost his megaphone, I’m troubled both by the system that let him have it and the way it was taken away. Simply put, the influential digital platforms are built to generate more Voldemorts, while also amassing worrisome amounts of centralized power.

Jones’ supporters lapped up his content and stoked outrage, leading to even more views. On YouTube, Alex Jones’ channel was so heavily recommended that watching regular political content often led to an autoplay of his red-faced rants.

The tech (social media) platforms have arbitrary power to decide what to amplify, and thus what to bury, and they have the power to banish as they wish. There is nothing aside from backlash to stop them from deplatforming, say, tech critics or politicians who call for shutting tax loopholes for massive corporations. Without due process or accountability, a frustrated public is left with appealing to a few powerful referees—and crossing our fingers.

Legislators, courts, users, and the platforms themselves have to be involved. There are some precedents we could use from older technologies. Some updated version of the fairness doctrine, which required radio and television stations to devote time to issues of public importance and seek out a multiplicity of views, could be revived for the digital age. We could come up with a kind of Fair Credit Reporting Act that gives users a right to challenge a platform banishment.