More chaos for far right profit rage agitator. |
The empire of Alex Jones is collapsing. The far right kookspiracist has been blocked by YouTube.
Now the kook is calling for others to be banned.
Spotify, Facebook, Stitcher and Apple have also put the brakes on Jones.
Infowars is being blocked on most social media outlets.
So far, Jones has been hit with a lawsuit from the grieving families of the Newtown shooting. The family of Sandy Hook victims have been subjected to death threats inspired by Jones.
Jones complains that the Sandy Hook massacre was a staged hoax. He also believed that Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg is a "crisis actor." Each of these claims were recanted by Jones after the lawsuits were served.
He is being sued for defamation of character and promoting a campaign of hatred.
The bans have been swift and startling, coming after mounting public backlash against Infowars’ pernicious rhetoric, which is most notorious for helping popularize the false belief that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting never happened. Jones is currently the defendant in a precedent-setting lawsuit brought against him by the parents of a Sandy Hook victim.
But the ongoing conversation around the real-life damage Jones and his network have inflicted has also been accompanied by weeks of hedging from major internet companies, including Facebook and Spotify, about how to deal with Jones on their platforms while still protecting free speech.
Initially, Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify all took selective action, banning some episodes of Jones’s podcasts and shows or removing selected social media posts they found to be in violation of various policies while allowing Infowars channels to remain active. Last Thursday, the popular audio streaming app Stitcher became the first platform to pull all of Jones’s content, without a lot of fuss.
But on Sunday night, Apple followed suit, summarily banning all of Jones’s content from iTunes — in the process sending a definitive message about what is and isn’t permissible free speech. Almost immediately, the dominoes began to fall: In the hours since Apple took action, multiple sites have started scrambling to reverse positions they were defending just a week ago.
The most notable of these is Facebook, which abruptly about-faced on its own free speech policy just hours after Apple did, essentially in the middle of the night. After that came YouTube, which appeared to ban Jones’s channel (which had more than 2.5 million subscribers as of Monday) from its platform late Monday morning.
It's part of a campaign to hold conservative agitators like Jones, Laura Ingraham, Sean "Softball" Hannity and Matt Drudge accountable for the years of promoting bullshit and divisiveness.
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