Finding the Center

Recently, several social media outlets basically announced that they were kicking several pages and accounts run by Alex Jones off of their services. This has, of course, kicked off the rather familiar debate about what constitutes an infringement on someone's free speech and whether or not the companies in question can or should do these things.

I'm actually not interested in commenting much on the free speech portion of this question. Instead, I'm going to focus on some of the examples that conservative defenders of Jones are reaching for - specifically, examples of liberals who have done objectionable things and haven't been kicked off of every major social media platform.

It's actually kind of instructive, and a little disturbing, to see what sort of person or what sort of behavior some people believe makes one a left-wing version of one of the most famously absurd conspiracy theorists in the country. I certainly don't think any of the comparisons I've seen are even remotely appropriate; I think people forget far too easily about the extent and absurdity of the conspiracy theories Jones has ranted about for over twenty years. 

A lot of it can be attributed to the way that the echo chambers we live in shift where we think the center is. If one could reasonably argue that the moderate right wing types look like the center, the more extreme examples look moderate, and the lunatic fringe looks like the extreme right, than one might be forgiven for thinking that Alex is just as far away from the center as the original extreme left. However, I don't think defining the center that way is reasonable.

This, of course, isn't a defense of the liberals involved; I certainly think the liberal examples I've seen aren't acceptable either. However, expecting me to react the same way to those isolated incidents and to Jones' consistent absurdity is not reasonable.