What Does It Mean to Ban Alex Jones?; The Atlantic, August 7, 2018

Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic; What Does It Mean to Ban Alex Jones?

"In banning the Infowars page, Facebook took the next logical step in restricting access to Infowars content, but it still hasn’t outright banned the domain, and it has not disclosed how the News Feed algorithm is dealing with URLs from Infowars.com.  

All of which is to say: There are many kinds of bans, and they each represent a different tool technology companies can use to police speech. Platforms can weaken the distribution of content they don’t like. They can ban the discovery of content they don’t like, as Apple has with Jones’s podcasts. Platforms can decline to host content they don’t like, as YouTube and Facebook have with InfoWars videos and pages, respectively. Or platforms can ban the presence of content they don’t like, regardless of where it is hosted or discovered."