Facebook and YouTube Give Alex Jones a Wrist Slap
On Friday, Facebook barred Alex Jones, who runs the Infowars website, from posting for 30 days because of repeated policy violations. YouTube has placed a first strike against his account; two more within 90 days would mean termination.
The digital walls are closing in on Alex Jones, the social media shock jock whose penchant for right-wing conspiracy theories and viral misinformation set off a heated debate about the limits of free speech on internet platforms.
Facebook said on Friday that it had suspended Mr. Jones from posting on the site for 30 days because he had repeatedly violated its policies. The social network also took down four videos posted by Mr. Jones and Infowars, the website he oversees.
.. Mr. Jones appeared on a live-streamed Facebook video on his page on Friday, shortly after the suspension went into effect, in which he claimed that he was the victim of a media conspiracy to “de-platform” conservative voices.
“This is war,” Mr. Jones said in the video.
.. This week, Facebook determined that one of Mr. Jones’s recent videos — an inflammatory rant in which he accused Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, of supporting pedophilia and pantomimed shooting him — did not violate its policies.
.. This is not the first time that Mr. Jones’s videos have received a strike from YouTube. In February, YouTube levied a strike for a video claiming that David Hogg, one of the outspoken student survivors of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., was a “crisis actor.” YouTube said the video had violated its policies around harassment and bullying. But since there were no additional violations during the next 90 days, the strike was removed from the account.
.. Mr. Jones, who first gained notoriety by insisting that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were an “inside job” by the United States government. Since then, he has questioned whether the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a hoax, promoted the so-called Pizzagate conspiracy theory and said fluoridated water was part of a government mind-control plot.
Despite these unsupported views, social media platforms have allowed him to gain a wide audience. Conservatives have accused Facebook, YouTube and other platforms of censoring right-wing views in the past, and have rallied behind him before.
.. This month, at a press event in New York about Facebook’s efforts to combat misinformation and false news, a reporter from CNN questionedcompany executives about why Infowars was still allowed to have a Facebook account. At the time, the company appeared unwilling to say Mr. Jones’s content violated its policies.
.. “Look, as abhorrent as some of this content can be, I do think that it gets down to this principle of giving people a voice,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, said in a Recode podcast interview.
As an example, Mr. Zuckerberg cited Holocaust denial as a message that he found personally offensive but was wary of removing from Facebook, in order to protect users’ free-speech rights.
.. One group of Facebook workers, which included people of Jewish and Eastern European descent, raised Mr. Zuckerberg’s position on Holocaust denial with their superiors, saying they found it incomprehensible, according to the employee.
.. Facebook’s policies about misinformation have been vague and inconsistently applied, and the company has appeared flat-footed when dealing with popular purveyors of conspiracy theories and hyperpartisan content such as Mr. Jones and Infowars.
.. Facebook executives struggled to define the company’s policies regarding accounts that repeatedly post false or misleading news. The executives said that if third-party fact-checkers found roughly one-third of an account’s posts false, the account would be demoted, or “down-ranked,” in order to limit its visibility. The company has refused to reveal a list of accounts that have been down-ranked. Later, the company said it would remove, rather than down-rank, misinformation that could lead to physical violence.