WILLIAM BRANGHAM: He may be America's best
known conspiracy theorist, but this week,
Alex Jones' content will be a little harder
to find.
That's because iTunes, Facebook, Spotify and
YouTube all removed his audio and video material
from their platforms, saying Jones violated
their policies on hate speech.
The "NewsHour"'s P.J. Tobia has more.
P.J. TOBIA: For more than 20 years, Jones
has screamed.
ALEX JONES, Host, "The Alex Jones Show": What
is Hitler?
What is Stalin?
What is Mao?
P.J. TOBIA: And shouted.
ALEX JONES: You will never, never defeat the
human spirit.
You will never defeat God.
You will never win.
P.J. TOBIA: On the way to winning over millions
of fans of his nationally syndicated radio
program, online video broadcasts, and Infowars
Web site.
With his slogan, "There's a war on for your
mind," Jones specializes in conspiracy theories.
Perhaps his most infamous claim, that the
school shooting in Sandy Hook, Connecticut,
was a hoax perpetrated by the government.
ALEX JONES: Sandy Hook is synthetic, completely
fake, with actors, in my view, manufactured.
P.J. TOBIA: Victims' families have sued Jones
for defamation.
He's long supported President Trump, who appeared
on one of his programs as a candidate in December
of 2015.
DONALD TRUMP, President of the United States:
Your reputation is amazing.
I will not let you down.
You will be very, very impressed, I hope.
And I think we will be speaking a lot.
P.J. TOBIA: Jones' media operation is funded
in part through sales at his Infowars store.
ALEX JONES: I'm doing free shipping on everything,
whether it's one Hillary for prison shirt
or a Bill Clinton rape shirt.
P.J. TOBIA: He combines his sales pitch for
nutritional supplements with political ideology.
ALEX JONES: On record to be some of the best
shots we have got at countering and blocking
the globalist operations.
So, again, am I a beach body?
No.
Am I Tarzan?
No.
Am I some Olympic swimmer?
No.
The point is, I'm a big guy.
P.J. TOBIA: This morning, Jones broadcasted
a Periscope message in response to his being
kicked off the social media platforms.
ALEX JONES: They disappeared me, like I have
been airbrushed out of those old Soviet photos
with Stalin, and as he killed each person,
he had them airbrushed out.
If this isn't "1984," baby, I don't know what
is.
P.J. TOBIA: Jones has spawned hundreds of
imitators, mostly right-wing, anti-government
conspiracy theorists peddling merchandise
and the real story the government doesn't
want you to know about.
MARK DICE, YouTube Host: Love him or hate
him, Alex is like the canary in the coal mine.
And these big tech companies conspiring together
to de-platform him on the same day changes
everything.
P.J. TOBIA: Aside from his Web site, Jones'
radio show is syndicated to over 160 stations
nationwide.
Despite Jones' ban from YouTube and the resulting
loss of over two million subscribers on the
platform, Infowars contributors remain a presence
on YouTube and Facebook.
There are still many platforms for Alex Jones
to wage what he sees as a war for American
minds.
For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm P.J. Tobia.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: We take a closer look now
at the growing pushback against Alex Jones
with Lyrissa Lidsky.
She's the dean of the University of Missouri
School of Law, and has been following these
moves and other legal actions against Alex
Jones.
Dean Lidsky, thank you very much for being
here.
All of these social media platforms are taking
Alex Jones off their sites.
And they're arguing that he violates their
hate speech rules.
I wonder what your reaction to that is.
LYRISSA LIDSKY, Dean, University of Missouri
School of Law: There are two things really
that need to be understood.
One is, the First Amendment only protects
citizens against restrictions on their speech
by the government and government actors.
And platforms like Facebook or Google are
not government actors.
So the First Amendment simply doesn't speak
to their conduct.
The other thing that people sometimes misunderstand
is that hate speech itself is not a legal
category, although it may overlap with things
like true threats or defamation that are legal
categories.
And so the government cannot broadly restrict
anything that it might label hate speech,
but platforms can if they wish to.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Twitter's CEO, as we saw,
Jack Dorsey, the CEO of the company, said
he's taking the opposite of that approach.
They're not banning Alex Jones.
He wrote: "We didn't suspend Alex Jones or
Infowars yesterday.
We know that's hard for many, but the reason
is simple: He hasn't violated our rules.
We will enforce if he does."
And, as you're saying, that's absolutely within
Twitter's right.
LYRISSA LIDSKY: It is absolutely within Twitter's
rights.
And it's also within user rights to put pressure
on Twitter for that.
But Jack Dorsey this morning in a tweet said
that what he expects to happen is for journalists
and others to counteract Alex Jones' falsehoods
with true, factual information and to drown
out his hateful and distorted speech with
the true, factual information that they find.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: So, when Alex Jones and
his supporters argue that this is just outright
censorship, you say they may feel that they're
being censored, but there really is no standing
that he has to argue legally that he's being
censored?
LYRISSA LIDSKY: Yes.
Censorship is a legal term for when the government
restricts your speech.
And he's not being censored.
There are a lot of people calling for the
platforms to take him down, but that doesn't
count as legal censorship.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: What do you make of the
slippery slope argument that some people have
been arguing, that, yes, these social media
sites have become such important arbiters
and dispensers of news and information in
our world, but once they start picking and
choosing, that that is a problematic move
for society?
LYRISSA LIDSKY: Well, it's complicated.
I am an ardent, ardent defender of free speech.
And I am concerned about the ability of Facebook,
for example, to pick and choose what speech
is on its network.
But I'm not concerned when they make a reasoned
determination, as they have to, that the kind
of fabricated lies that are causing harm to
individuals need to be taken down from their
site.
I don't think Alex Jones is a hard case, per
se, but I would hope, for free expression
purposes, that platforms would go case by
case.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Alex Jones is also facing
some challenges in the legal realm.
He's being sued for libel and defamation,
one, as we mentioned before, about the parents
of some of the children who were killed at
Sandy Hook, and another by a man who filmed
the video of the car hitting the counterprotester
at the Charlottesville white supremacist rally
last year.
What do those individuals need to prove in
order to win their case in court?
LYRISSA LIDSKY: OK, so in order to win, they
need to prove that Alex Jones made a defamatory
statement, which is a statement that would
tend to harm reputation.
In both cases, he claimed that they were crisis
actors who in one instance invented the death
of their children, and, in the other instance,
he claims that the person who filmed the car
driving into the protester in Charlottesville
had himself been part of the incident, had
been somewhat responsible for her death and
had fabricated it.
So those are clearly statements that tend
to harm reputation, identifying these people
that are published to an audience of millions.
And then after that, there's a question.
There is a novel legal question as to what
the plaintiffs must prove in addition.
And that question hinges on whether the -- whether
the parents of the murdered children are called
public figures or they're private figures,
and whether the eyewitness who filmed the
Charlottesville killing was a public figure
or private figure.
We have more leeway to criticize people who
are have thrust themselves into the forefront
of public controversies, celebrities and our
government officials, our public officials.
We have less leeway with regard to people
who are just living their lives, private individuals.
Let me add that even if the parents and Mr.
Gilmore are determined to be public figures,
they are likely to win lawsuits against Mr.
Jones because he fabricated lies that tarnished
their reputations and caused them tangible
harm.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Well, those are certainly
cases we're going to be following quite closely.
Lyrissa Lidsky, dean of the University of
Missouri School of Law, thank you very much.
LYRISSA LIDSKY: Thank you.
