This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 16th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The removal of conspiracy monger Alex Jones from platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Apple

Podcasts doesn't implicate the First Amendment, but there are some reasons for concern.

John Samples is a vice president at the Cato Institute. We spoke yesterday.

Alex Jones, the Internet Provocateur, producer of documentaries with limited citations and somebody who is perhaps best known for saying

that the Sandy Hook massacre was faked, has been removed from various platforms, large-scale platforms, that, from which I assume

he derived a lot of income and a lot of his notoriety and his ability to really easily communicate with his audience.

So what are the speech implications, if any, of these several privately owned platforms from removing

all of his content based upon what they consider to be violations of terms of service.

So there's, first question is, did they actually get him?

Did they actually remove him from these platforms

since they acted together, except for Twitter,

which said he hadn't violated their rules.

There's some question about, you know, a kind of Strison effect that his

app, which was not banned, was downloaded more.

So it's not clear yet whether they're actually going to be at

effective removal. The question here is why? Why did they do this? Why is it

justified? That's the big interesting question. There's short-term

questions of yelling about Alex Jones. When you say why is it justified under what

grounds? Like that that's justified under under what grounds. Yes.

Like that's justified under the First Amendment, which seems clearly not to be implicated here

...