Keeping Down with the Jones's
/By Don Varyu
Oct. 12, 2022
Several weeks ago, a jury ordered internet conspiracy jock Alex Jones to pay $50 million to the parents of a sweet little kid ripped to shreds by an automatic weapon while at school in 2012. On Wednesday, a separate jury representing another dozen families of those mutilated kids ordered Jones to pay $965 million more (nine hundred and sixty-five million). Thus, total judgments have soared past $1 billion. That’s a number that will open eyes.
It is hard to imagine the permanent pain and anguish of those families. Surely, every one would gladly pay back any monetary reward--and everything they owned--if they could just have their precious little folks back. But their initial suffering wasn’t enough for Jones. He added insult to injury by carrying out a decade-long campaign alleging the massacre never happened...claiming it was all a government hoax...and asserting those grieving parents were just hired actors. It couldn’t get any worse—and it did.
Even those sins weren't enough for Jones—he added injury-to-insult-to-injury by urging an imbecile mob to not only embrace his grand lie, but to conduct an online and in-person campaign of threats and harassment to further torture those parents. Their homes were surrounded. When they came out, they were bombarded with abuse and horrible allegations. Death and rape threats came via social media. One of the dads found a protestor urinating on the grave of his son, intending to then dig up the coffin to prove there was no little corpse inside.
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But as horrific as all this is, I wonder if there isn’t a new form of terror now spreading--among the social media companies.
I would imagine that the outrage of this latest Jones jury was motived by two things: first, Jones’ creation of the sick myth; and then his relentless spreading of this blasphemy. Jones claims he didn’t make it up—that he heard it from someone else. But does it really matter? I’m guessing that for Facebook and YouTube and 4chan and 8chan and Tic Tok and all the rest, it might. They are spreaders on a much vaster scale.
If Jones were punished with a ten-figure penalty for broadcasting something false and hateful and bizarre…could that also put the massively larger online cesspools in a more deadly crosshairs? What might they be ordered to pay? So, what could they do to protect themselves?
For years, the owners of these sites have made false and misleading statements about their intentions and their programs to control or remove such dangerous content. The public listened and hoped that they really were intent on finding and scrubbing such rubbish.
In fact, the exact opposite remains true. The billions of posts added daily are not reviewed by humans; they’re run through algorithms. And those algorithms are designed for one purpose—to boost engagement. Whatever keeps people connected is king. How does the code do that? By prioritizing posts that are the most extreme, the most outrageous. These produce the strongest and longest engagement.
After years of relative silence, Zuckerberg was finally forced to write that:
…one of the biggest issues social networks face is that when left unchecked, people will engage disproportionately with more sensationalist and provocative content…at scale, this can undermine the quality of public discourse and lead to polarization.
Thanks, Jeff! Geez, who could have possibly known? After this admission, the actions Zuckerberg authorized (almost all through third-party moderators) have only made things worse. Those independent companies are judged on increased engagement—which means ignoring and passing through the most outrageous stuff. And by the way, what plagues Facebook generally pales in comparison to what flows freely on other, more radical sites.
So, what happens when a corporate lawyer says to a young social media master, “look, if this happened to Jones, it could happen to us. And a billion-dollar judgment could be just a starting point.”
The first line of defense will certainly be the one the lunatic libertarians in Silicon Valley always use: free speech. “All points of view deserve to be heard” might as well fly on the Valley flag. Forget how vile that point of view might be.
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In 1917, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that free speech, “…would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” He said such acts could cause “substantive evils” to the community at large—and that needed to take precedence.
With that logic, what would Holmes say about an Internet “theatre” of nearly five billion people, all scrambling over each other amid false shouts of rape, murder, child abuse, assassination and terrorism?
Lines need to be drawn. And with their verdict, the jury in this most recent Jones trial drew one. People who lie and terrorize for personal gain can be found responsible for community panic—and thus lose everything.
The big boys better pay attention.
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