From the August 8 edition of Premiere Radio Networks' The Sean Hannity Show:
Sean Hannity thanks Jack Dorsey and Twitter for sticking up for Alex Jones
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published
SEAN HANNITY (HOST): You know all this stuff that is going on, Alex Jones, Infowars, Louis Farrakhan, YouTube, and Facebook, I for the most part have just -- I use my Twitter, Facebook, Instagram accounts, I have them, but I’ve taken them all off my phone, and I’m gonna tell you the real reason why. Now we use it -- I still will fight with somebody. Who did I take a shot at, oh Jimmy Acosta, recently.
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But all of this is happening. Now on the surface, you might think, ah, this is easy. No, it’s not so easy. How do you make the decision, where’s the slippery slope? I think probably everyone would agree, when it comes to certain things that people post, if you’re calling for violence or threatening violence, I think that’s kind of a no-brainer for any social media group to get rid of, like for example, remember years ago we had The Anarchist Cookbook was out -- teaches people how to build fertilizer bombs or the like, so whatever it is, these type of bombs that can kill people. That was a big controversy at the time.
Now we all believe in freedom of speech. Now you have a sidebar issue, and that is that well these companies are either privately or publicly held, but this is not the government banning your speech. These are people making editorial decisions which, by the way, people make every single day. They can decide who they want, what they want. But I think it’s a slippery slope, if you’re gonna ban this person with this political point of view and you don’t like what this person says. Where does it stop? And who decides? And how do you decide? And what does it do to your business model? Let me tell you right now, these companies are in total freak out mode over this.
And while I know Alex Jones is controversial, I don’t listen to other radio shows. I’ve seen segments of his show on Mediaite for example. I know that he’s got this lawsuit and some comments he made I guess post-Sandy Hook, that he didn’t think it happened and he calls other things red flags or whatever, I know he also had supported Trump, but I haven’t been paying a whole lot of attention to it.
And then there was a great column on Mediaite, well ok, where’s the ban on Louis Farrakhan? Now you’ve got a dilemma, don’t you, because he’s a known racist and anti-Semite. And I’m not comparing the two in any way, I am just looking at, I’m just picking out examples as they exist.
I look at Twitter, for example, and I have seen more brutal, hateful, despicable, disgusting comments about me, and I don’t care. Memes about me, and I don’t care. And people attacking me, and I don’t care.
I tend to be, as I think many of you know, a First Amendment purist, in the sense that, as long as you’re not advocating violence, you know -- look if I’m a company, are you gonna want a white nationalist Klansman racist on your site? I wouldn’t. Nobody really would. And that’s a no-brainer, what about people that then on the other side support Louis Farrakhan? I wouldn’t him on the -- knowing his background and the things he's said, I wouldn’t want the things he's said on any site that I own. Alright, what about those people that think they’re clever, and they’re obviously making dog whistles, as MSNBC says, you know what they’re saying, you know they’re racist. You know they’re anti-Semites. You know they’re virulently anti-gay and hateful. I don’t particularly like bigoted people. I wouldn’t want any of that on my sites.
So it's -- but it gets to be a little more slippery. You’re gonna decide -- how many people would like to have me banned -- as a mainstream conservative -- just because they don’t like my political points of view?
Are you going to ban somebody because they say this or that, I can’t even bring you up all the examples here.
Twitter for example decided not to ban Alex Jones or Infowars. Anyway I do have an interview announcement, Jack Dorsey is the CEO of Twitter. I think this is far more difficult, far more nuanced than I think a lot of people imagine. I think that while Facebook and YouTube officials are hiding under their desks not knowing what to do next, I really give Jack Dorsey a lot of credit cause he agreed to come on the program today.
And really -- and this is not a confrontational interview I want to have with him, I want to ask him how do you decide, I want to ask him about shadow banning, which has been a big legitimate complaint by conservatives.
Related:
NY Magazine: Twitter Is Not ‘Shadow Banning’ Republicans
The Verge: Why Twitter should ignore the phony outrage over “shadow banning”
Previously:
Periscope is still hosting video where Alex Jones pantomimed shooting Robert Mueller
In their own words, the online far-right’s motive to dig up liberal figures' old tweets: revenge