United States: Alex Jones, the fall of the chief plotter

Published on: 13/10/2022 – 11:10 Alex Jones, figure of the American far right and owner of the conspiracy site Infowars, was sentenced on Wednesday to pay 965 million dollars in compensation for defamation and moral damage to the families of victims of the Sandy Hook school massacre in 2012, which he had denied was real. In 2018, the conspiracy theorist was banned from almost all social networks in less than 24 hours. This article was originally published on August 7, 2018 when Alex Jones was banned from almost all social networks. France 24 is republishing it today when this conspiracy theorist was sentenced on Wednesday October 12 to pay almost a billion dollars in compensation to the families of victims of the massacre at the Sandy Hook school, in Connecticut, for the moral suffering caused by his fallacious words.—————————————-Even YouPorn has decided, Monday August 6, to ban from its platform the star conspiracy theorist of the American extreme right Alex Jones. The pornographic site, which hosted dozens of videos of the American commentator and agitator, followed the movement initiated the day before by Apple and which had a snowball effect. so i got an unsolicited statement just now that the adult site YouPorn is banning Alex Jones and Infowars content from its platform (what? ok.) pic.twitter.com/U4IwkGf4FO Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) August 6, 2018 , little more than Twitter which still tolerated the presence of Alex Jones on its platform. Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, Pinterest and LinkedIn all kicked him off their sites, citing a violation of rules of conduct. available on the Apple Store – contained hate messages. Facebook was even more specific, explaining that content on Alex Jones’ page “glorified violence, and used dehumanizing language against transgender people, Muslims and immigrants.” American alt-right (a nebula bringing together the far right and the conspiracy theorists) for years. Alex Jones has indeed built a conspiratorial empire on the Internet by claiming, among other things, that the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012 was a government-orchestrated scene or that Hillary Clinton belonged, during the presidential campaign of 2016, to a pedophile network responsible for the death of several children. most vocal and most listened to voices of the pro-Trump camp. His channel on YouTube had over 2.4 million subscribers. His most famous fan is none other than Donald Trump, the President of the United States. The latter called him live during one of his shows in 2015 to congratulate him on his work and promise him that he would not disappoint him if he entered the White House. The almost simultaneous decision of all these platforms to ban Alex Jones, while highly anticipated, has also drawn its fair share of criticism. “She plays Alex Jones’ game by turning him into a martyr,” laments the technology news site Wired. The main interested party was also quick to pose as the victim of a “coordinated action” of the tech giants who would seek, through him, to silence the “conservatives” with the approach of the American elections of mid-term in November 2018. The eagerness to follow Apple’s example also gave the impression that other social networks were “reacting above all out of self-interest so as not to appear as the only platform to tolerate a discourse unanimously denounced as ‘ hateful’”, reports the site Slate. Change of mentalityNevertheless. This almost generalized blacklisting of Alex Jones would illustrate a significant change in mentality on the part of social networks, believes Wired. For years, these platforms have tolerated the presence of users of the caliber of Alex Jones in the name of free speech. This promise of “openness to all, absence of prejudice and laxity has long been one of the great assets of these sites compared to traditional media which control much more what they publish”, notes the site. The strategy worked so well that Facebook & Co. became the main sources of information for a majority of Americans. . The power of social media allowed anyone to be as audible as most mainstream media, while the refusal to judge content allowed Alex Jones to appear as legitimate as less extreme commentators. By censoring this conspiracy theorist, these platforms “assume, like any media, that they are private companies which have the right to judge the contents, and not a public service obliged to protect freedom of expression at all costs ”, concludes Wired. This shift did not happen overnight. It took the fight against terrorist propaganda on social networks, the debate on the proliferation of fake news and finally the Cambridge Analytica scandal to get to this point. It remains to be seen what fate awaits all Alex Jones apprentices, like Jack Posobiec or Paul Joseph Watson, the other restless Infowars. They both have more than 500,000 subscribers on YouTube or Twitter and are determined to continue the work of the founder of Infowars.