Facebook on Monday announced it had “unpublished” four pages associated with Alex Jones and his right-wing conspiracy website, Infowars, for repeated violations of Facebook’s community standards.
Facebook said the four pages — “the Alex Jones Channel Page, the Alex Jones Page, the Infowars Page and the Infowars Nightly News Page” — had been removed “for repeated violations of Community Standards and accumulating too many strikes.”
“In addition, one of the admins of these Pages – Alex Jones – was placed in a 30-day block for his role in posting violating content to these Pages,” Facebook said.
The pages violated Facebook’s hate speech, bullying and graphic violence policies, Facebook said, noting that since last week it had taken down material from the pages for “glorifying violence.”
“None of the violations,” it said, were related to “false news.”
Infowars’ Paul Joseph Watson wrote in a tweet and an article on Infowars’ website that the outlet had been “permanently” banned from Facebook. But Facebook said unpublished pages can appeal that decision. “If they don’t appeal or their appeal fails, we remove the Page,” the website’s statement read.
Watson called the move “a shocking intensification of Big Tech’s censorship purge.”
Apple also removed Jones’ and Infowars podcasts from iTunes and Apple Podcasts on Monday, with one exception, according to the Washington Post. Stitcher, the podcast application, removed Jones’ podcasts on Friday, per Billboard. Spotify removed The Alex Jones Show on Monday, The Guardian reported, but left up Infowars’ other podcasts.
Jones is well-known for his conspiracy theories about major historical events like September 11th, and for often random assertions, like his belief that Jews have in the past dressed up as Nazis in order to exaggerate the size of the extremist far-right.
Currently, Jones faces several lawsuits for his assertion that the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, which left 20 children and six adults dead, was a hoax. The parents of one six-year-old Sandy Hook victim said they’d moved seven times after stalkers repeatedly found out where they were living and began harassing them.
“I would love to go see my son’s grave and I don’t get to do that, but we made the right decision,” Veronique De La Rosa, part of a defamation suit against Jones, told the New York Times late last month.
libtards is shaDOWbannING patriots! WE must COME uP with a MEDIA outlet THAT CAN GET our VOICEs heard!!!
Um, Fox News? They’ll publish anything it seems.
It’s only “censorship” when the government does it. But then, those stupid enough to work for Alex Jones don’t really understand that. Good for Facebook.
The poor dear. My thoughts and prayers are with him. They aren’t publishable, but they are certainly with him.
An astute observation I’ve seen made elsewhere: Facebook has always forbidden certain categories of speech, including speech that would be protected in an American legal framework. Sexual content has always been completely forbidden, even back when Facebook was de facto 18+ only. That’s a purely moral judgement and it always has been.
To suggest that they’ve ever attempted to act even remotely as a common carrier is completely disingenuous.