On Alex Jones, social media sites and free speech

Question: If Alex Jones stands in the middle of the Gobi Desert and shouts ugly lies about me that no one hears, is it slander? Answer: No, because he doesn’t damage anyone’s reputation.

Second question: What’s the difference between Barnes and Noble refusing to display porno magazines and Facebook refusing to display Alex Jones? Answer: None. In both cases, it’s their company, so they can chose to purvey whatever material they want.

Christian bookstores can refuse to sell Satanist texts – this doesn’t make the texts vanish from the planet, they just don’t get sold in these stores. The product Facebook and Twitter sell is your eyeballs on their content. These companies are simply trying to protect their financial base when they decide not to offend their viewers, just as the Christian bookstore avoids offending its customers. It’s simply our capitalist Constitution at work. When a big company decides to close its factory in a town, in effect destroying the community, we accept that. Business is business, right? It’s the American way. Surely Alex Jones gets that.

The current outcry over Apple, podcasters, Twitter and other media shutting out down access to Jones’s “Infowars” brings the concept of free speech into a sharp focus. This has nothing to do with the U.S. Constitution. The First Amendment specifies only that the government cannot restrict your speech, just the government. For many decades, newspapers have refused to publish letters to the editor that are factually wacko or just plain stupid. A barista can be fired because the boss doesn’t like her tattoo. The bottom line in Jones’s protest is that these online publishers are denying him his bottom line by denying him access to advertising or merchandizing revenue. Newspapers refuse to print all sorts of advertisements, so this is nothing new. And anyone who wants to can log onto Infowars.com.

Self-expression hits a speed bump when it travels down the capitalist highway. We live in a very strange era, when the nation’s highest court has ruled that money is speech. The Jones case is primarily about money, but those who see no complexity in life – the blunt object crew – see this heave-ho from online sites as censorship, a violation of his free speech. Perhaps Voltaire wrote it, or perhaps Evelyn Beatrice Hall wrote it, but in either case, the quotation is the rallying cry of free speech advocates: “I disapprove of what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”

Even as a journalist, I have issues with defending his right to say it, to unlimited free speech. No, you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater. You do prison time for threatening to kill the president, as did Ron Beaty, a county commissioner here in Barnstable County. If free speech is supposed to foster democracy and give people a voice, isn’t broadcasting lies on the internet a threat to democracy? The old thinking used to be that bad ideas will self-destruct, but clearly that is no longer true.

The Founding Fathers could never have envisioned the sort of harassment visited upon the grieving parents of Newtown by a money-grubbing con artist like Jones. We have driven off the map of their Constitution. Something needs to change.