Super fans of Alex Jones may be up in arms preparing for the next civil war after the news broke that Jones Infowars had been removed from the major digital content platforms all within a 24h period.
Alex Jones was the top trend on Twitter today, after having been shut down by four major digital distribution platforms including Apple, Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify. Alleged violations of the platforms community standards, who are citing hate speech as one of the factors that lead to the removal.
According to a statement from Facebook, which describes in detail the step by step process applied to the Alex Jones pages, the pages exceeded the allowable number of strikes against them and were therefore taken down.
Coordinated Strike
Social media companies have the right to police their sites for inappropriate content. But to see four digital platforms all taking action on the same day raises some questions. What specific content was in violation? And how do they define hate speech?
Jones mentioned that a coordinated effort is at play, where a group of activists are deployed to flag content that is in opposition to their ideology. This should be a concern for other publishers, especially ones with a more right-wing perspective. What would happen if activists saw this tactic was effective organized more attacks by mass flagging content of another publisher?
Losing content distribution on four major channels on the same day is going to disrupt user access to InfoWars but users can still access the content on www.infowars.com.
InfoWars doesn’t appear to rely on traffic for advertising to support its business model, which makes sense given the difficulty presented in attracting mainstream advertisers due to the controversial nature of the site.
If there was a coordinated effort to censor Alex Jones, the publicity surrounding the event today may actually end up help extend his audience.
The InfoWars app also began trending immediately after the news broke that he was purged from the major big tech platforms.