【1999 Archives】

Don't ask for whom the bell tolls999 Archives it tolls for Alex Jones.

The controversial conspiracy theorist and talk show host has found himself on the end of Facebook's ban hammer once again. The social media platform announced on Monday morning they had completely removed four of Jones' Facebook pages: the Alex Jones Channel Page, the Alex Jones Page, the InfoWars Page, and the InfoWars Nightly News Page.

The ban follows the removal of a handful of videos from those pages which also landed Jones in a 30-day timeout from Facebook. As for today's decision, Facebook laid it out in a statement posted to their site:

Since [the original ban], more content from the same Pages has been reported to us — upon review, we have taken it down for glorifying violence, which violates our graphic violence policy, and using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants, which violates our hate speech policies.

All four Pages have been unpublished for repeated violations of Community Standards and accumulating too many strikes. While much of the discussion around Infowars has been related to false news, which is a serious issue that we are working to address by demoting links marked wrong by fact checkers and suggesting additional content, none of the violations that spurred today’s removals were related to this.

Of course, given how Facebook has struggled against fake news being spread on its platform, it's noteworthy that wasn'tone of the reasons that Jones, a man who said the Sandy Hook shootings were faked and pushed the #Pizzagate conspiracy, was banned.

It's just the latest hit against InfoWars. Hours before the Facebook ban was announced, Apple removed the Info Wars podcasts from iTunes which itself follows decisions by Spotify and Stitcher to remove the show from those service.

YouTube, which is dealing with its own fake news problem, recently hit Jones and InfoWars with a second "strike," but the man and his show have not been banned yet from their service.

Perhaps the tech companies that have continued to give Jones' dangerous rhetoric and conspiracies a platform finally got a shove when Jones' own attorney, defending the host against a lawsuit brought by parents of victims in the Sandy Hook school shooting, said "no reasonable reader or listener" would actually believe Jones' nonsense.

It's similar to an argument that was brought up in the spring during a custody hearing between Jones and his ex-wife, that Jones is essentially playing a character when he hosts his shows and that he shouldn't be judged by his words and actions when playing that character.