Roku, the streaming video company, said Tuesday that it would no longer include a channel for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars network on its platform — less than a day after the new channel first went live.
After the InfoWars channel became available, we heard from concerned parties and have determined that the channel should be removed from our platform. Deletion from the channel store and platform has begun and will be completed shortly.
— Roku (@Roku) January 16, 2019
Roku’s Infowars channel came months after several media and tech companies — Twitter, Vimeo, Facebook, Apple, Spotify — removed Jones and his content from their platforms.
A judge recently ordered Jones to turn over Infowars financial and marketing documents to the families of Sandy Hook victims that sued Jones over his characterization of the 2012 elementary school shooting massacre as a hoax.
A spokesperson for Roku told NBC News that Jones had previously been on the platform, but that his content was “not used much” and required a subscription and authentication. That old channel and the new channel launched Monday were both removed from the Roku platform, the spokesperson told NBC News.
The report noted that Roku initially told Digiday Tuesday that “to our knowledge, InfoWars is not currently in violation of [Roku’s] content policies,” and that “we do not curate or censor based on viewpoint.”
H/t NBC News.
