After Silicon Valley crackdown, Alex Jones’ Infowars hardly has a soapbox left
Controversial U.S. conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has now been banned from nearly all major platforms, with Twitter almost the only remaining one on which he can voice his opinions.
On Monday, Facebook Inc. took down four of Jones’ pages, stating that he had continually violated its community standards. Facebook wrote that Jones had been given warnings for “for violating our hate speech and bullying policies” as well as “glorifying violence” and “using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants.”
Facebook added that though it treats allegations of false news seriously, that wasn’t the reason for the ban.
YouTube also moved against Jones, taking his channel of 2.4 million subscribers down. Again, it was recidivism to blame: Jones’ apparent contempt for community guidelines. Jones had already received a strike late July for posting content deemed offensive to Muslims and transgender people, as well as a video showing a child being pushed to the floor.
In a statement, YouTube said, “When users violate these policies repeatedly, like our policies against hate speech and harassment or our terms prohibiting circumvention of our enforcement measures, we terminate their accounts.”
Only hours before, Apple Inc. had removed Jones’ podcasts from its iTunes store, citing the same reasons. Apple said it won’t tolerate hate speech and the guidelines are clear enough about that. “Podcasts that violate these guidelines are removed from our directory making them no longer searchable or available for download or streaming,” Apple said in a statement. “We believe in representing a wide range of views, so long as people are respectful to those with differing opinions.”
Spotify Technologies SA followed suit, almost completely banning Jones from the platform after earlier removing only specific content of Jones’ show a week earlier. Three Infowars podcasts, however, remain on the platform.
“We take reports of hate content seriously and review any podcast episode or song that is flagged by our community,” Spotify said in a statement. “Due to repeated violations of Spotify’s prohibited content policies, The Alex Jones Show has lost access to the Spotify platform.”
For its part, Twitter told Fortune, “InfoWars and associated accounts are not currently in violation of the Twitter/Periscope Rules.” Twitter also noted that content posted by InfoWars elsewhere doesn’t always wind up on Twitter.
Jones’ responded to the blackout of his content on one of the only platforms he has left to air his opinions. On Twitter’s livestreaming platform Periscope, Jones said he was being persecuted by Silicon Valley. “Infowars is the most censored program in the world,” said Jones, “because we know the truth.”
Jones then spent some time entreating listeners to buy certain Infowars doomsday products, so that “patriots” can financially support the cause after these recent killer blows by some of the main players in Silicon Valley. “Everyone must turn to Infowars as a standard to be saved,” Jones added, befitting an evangelist.
Image: Sean P. Anderson/Flickr
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