Alex Jones Ban - Collusion or Coincidence?

Well, it has come to this. Although hardly surprising, Alex Jones has finally been banned from almost all major social media (except for Twitter). I'm honestly surprised it took this long, given how many others were banned before him. This article will not delve into whether this was right, or the issues that arise from Jones' ban. Rather, this will address one fact of this situation that has raised a ton of eyebrows - the fact that Jones was banned from YouTube, Facebook, ITunes, and Spotify within 12 hours. Jones has been active for decades, and his views have not serious changed for well over a decade, so it is a remarkable "coincidence" that these platforms all banned him within this short period of time.

This has led many people to believe that these platforms all planned to ban him at around the same time so that no one of them could be held accountable by free-speech advocates. However, there is also another theory, one where this series of bans was perhaps no so well planned out. This is the question of whether there was a "hard" collusion, or a "soft" collusion.

"Hard" Collusion - High level leaders of all of these companies (essentially just meaning Google, Apple, and Facebook) came together, talked over the idea of banning Jones, and decided to ban him.

"Soft" Collusion - These companies all had basically wanted to ban Jones for a long time, without needing to talk to each other about it. They were really just waiting because they knew they would have to deal with a ton of backlash if they banned him. This is still a sort of collusion because the companies are all keeping half an eye on each other before making their decisions, so are not really acting entirely independently.

Personally, I am more inclined to believe the second is more likely. It's just not necessary for companies to actually meet and talk this sort of thing over like the hard collusion theory states. They all hate what he says, and they all had wanted to ban him for some time. As soon as somebody went first, they all said "thank God, somebody else to take the flak" and then went ahead and did what they were dying to do anyway. It's like when a teacher asks the class a question and nobody answers it, but all of the students know what the teacher wants them to say. When somebody does say it, all of the tension is released. There is simply no need for hard collusion here - it's Occam's Razor.