![]() ![]() I asked them why InfoWars is still allowed on the platform. But in the meantime, the lawsuit has galvanized the public conversation around the damage that Infowars has done - and merged with the ongoing conversation about Facebook’s responsibility for combating the spread of fake news.įacebook invited me to an event today where the company aimed to tout its commitment to fighting fake news and misinformation. Pozner and De La Rosa are behind the aforementioned lawsuit against Jones and Infowars, and its outcome stands to redefine the question of what “free speech” is, legally. Those parents include Lenny Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, whose 6-year-old son Noah was killed in the attack and who have since had to move seven times in the past five years to escape harassment from Sandy Hook “truthers” egged on by the unsupportable fringe rhetoric of Infowars. The latter has resulted in multiple parents of Sandy Hook victims being extensively targeted online. YouTube, Facebook, and Apple’s ban on Alex Jones, explainedīut the question of Infowars’ policy violations is not theoretical it is a fringe broadcast network that has on multiple occasions propagated conspiracies with appalling real-world effects, from Pizzagate to the false belief that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax. And so sites that just a week ago were tentatively committed to protecting Jones’s “free speech” couldn’t about-face fast enough. That’s almost certainly why, as soon as Apple took the step of entirely banning Jones and his content, the cudgel fell: All of a sudden, the more controversial action would have been to allow Jones and Infowars to remain. The swiftness of these removals highlights a truth that many tech companies don’t want to fully acknowledge in an age of increased ideological polarization among their users: The idea of “protecting free speech” isn’t actually a hard-and-fast policy on their sites, but rather an increasingly handy excuse they can use to avoid taking controversial action. ![]() Spotify, which spent last week under fire after it decided to remove only selected episodes of Jones’s shows from its streaming platform, has also followed Apple’s lead, removing its entire library of Infowars-related media. 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.īREAKING: YouTube has banned the channel used by Alex Jones and Infowars /SBak5m4rvg- BNO News August 6, 2018 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. 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. Last Thursday, the popular audio streaming app Stitcher became the first platform to pull all of Jones’s content, without a lot of fuss.īut 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. 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. ![]() Jones is currently the defendant in a precedent-setting lawsuit brought against him by the parents of a Sandy Hook victim.īut 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. 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. Within the past 24 hours, Apple, Facebook, and YouTube have all joined in summarily banning far-right broadcaster and known conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his Infowars network from their platforms. ![]()
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