Alex Jones is having a lot of fun as of late. On top of recent court battles he now gets to add the pain of having his content removed from several major aggregators:
Apple, Facebook, YouTube and Spotify took their most aggressive steps yet to penalize conspiracy theorist and prominent right-wing talk show host Alex Jones for violating their hate speech policies.
Apple, Facebook, Spotify, and Google are all private businesses that have every right to refuse service to anybody. Moreover, I understand why any company would want to refuse service to Alex Jones. However, this is yet another lesson on the cost of centralization.
The aggregation of a majority of people’s information is now controlled by a handful of companies. This situation would be egregious if those companies used heavy handed tactics to coerce creators into relying on their services for distribution. But the power that companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google hold was given to them by creators who didn’t want to deal with the hassle of distribution themselves. Now that those companies have that power, they can make creators who don’t have their own distribution channel disappear.
Alex Jones is better off than many in this case because he, as far as I know, maintains his own infrastructure so his content is still available to his fan base. But other creators should be paying attention. If you don’t maintain your own infrastructure, everything you’ve created and your connection with your fans would vanish with the snap of a few companies’ fingers.
I wonder if he will take a page from the Inrange TV playbook. As their youtube channel was under threat from rule changes, Karl began to post some of their content on Pornhub.
Would be hilarious to see more content creators take that route to distribution when the more mainstream channels try to kick them out. I hope Pornhub continues to allow additional content on their site as well.
On Ben’s suggestion of going with Pornhub: its actually surprisingly viable for PornHUb to take Youtube’s cake and eat it, they already have more daily visitors to the site, though watch time is less since it tends to be more purpose driven. They are really just behind in the infrastructure to handle the volume of videos that YouTube has and they have less lucrative advertising for monetization due to their content. but they are by far the biggest video competitor without a doubt.
These idiots accuse Trump of collusion then pull this? If our self styled elites are so stupid here, one can only wonder where else are these intellectual idiots are equally stupid?