Are Facebook and YouTube quasi-governmental actors?

The Economist:

ONE of the internet’s most odious conspiracy theorists has had his videos and podcasts removed from Apple, YouTube, Spotify and Facebook. Alex Jones (pictured), who has a radio show and runs a few websites, including Infowars, has raised doubts about the murders of 26 children and teachers in the Sandy Hook mass shooting, claiming the story was manufactured by gun-control advocates. He has suggested that America’s government was involved in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1993 and the September 11th terrorist attacks. He says that vaccinating children will give them autism. He repeatedly warns that America is on the brink of another civil war.

Mr Jones’s websites peddling this rubbish are still fully operational. But with the worlds’ biggest media platforms removing his pages and links over the past few days, he has lost direct access to millions of listeners and viewers. Mr Jones has, naturally, seen machinations in this too: the decisions by Apple, swiftly followed by others, to remove his material from their platforms feed with comic precision into his conspiracy theorising about mainstream media. “Apple, Spotify, Facebook and YouTube all banned Infowars within 12 hours of each other”, an Infowars writer wrote on August 6th. This is proof that the “purge was a co-ordinated effort” to meddle with the mid-term elections November rather than a good-faith effort to enforce the sites’ rules about hate speech.