Free Speech Scholars to Alex Jones: You’re Not Protected

Not long after several of the country’s biggest tech firms — Apple, Facebook and Google — kicked the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones off their various online platforms, Jones’s allies complained that he had been deprived of his First Amendment rights to free speech. Several scholars of free speech had already concluded that many of the things he has said online were not in fact protected by the First Amendment. 

In a recent court filing, four law professors who specialize in free-speech issues said that Mr. Jones’s oeuvre was riddled with “absurd conspiracy theories” and urged a federal judge considering a lawsuit against him not to let him hide behind the First Amendment while publishing his rhetoric. “False speech does not serve the public interest the way that true speech does,” the scholars wrote. “And indeed, there is no constitutional value in false statements of fact.” While they acknowledged that the protection of speech is “a priority of the first order,” the First Amendment scholars, from institutions like Rutgers University and the University of Chicago Law School, noted that since the Middle Ages defamation law has created “social boundaries about what speech is and is not acceptable.” It has also, they wrote, long sought to balance the freedom of expression with the safeguarding of people’s reputations.