Alex Jones Kicked Off iTunes, Facebook & YouTube Last Night
Censorship. 99% of the time brokeassstuart.com is against it. But when it comes to conspiracy theorist and mentally ill disc jokey Alex Jones, we’ll make an exception. Alex Jones is the host of InfoWars, a show that specializes in ‘debunking’ the mainstream media along with ‘government conspiracies’, the show’s tagline is literally “There’s a war on your mind!” Infowars is perhaps most infamous for repeatedly calling the massacre at Sandy Hook a Government Sponsored Hoax, and for spreading the Pizzagate story which ended with a confused Infowars listener shooting up a pizza parlor with an AR-15 rifle.
Apple and iTunes were the first kick Infowars and its content off their platform. Hours after Apple had purged the company’s shows, Facebook followed and removed their four Facebook pages, then YouTube suspended Infowar’s four youtube channels, and Spotify followed suit. Most of these companies referenced to a violation of their user agreement as the reasoning behind the Infowars suspension. Youtube’s boilerplate, ‘policies against hate speech and harassment’ were given to Buzzfeed when asked about the Infowar removal.
YouTube confirmed to BuzzFeed News that it has removed Alex Jones' channel. Here's the company's statement: pic.twitter.com/bykULKITjh
— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) August 6, 2018
Twitter has yet to remove Infowars from its platform. In fact, former Reddit CEO Ellen K Pao called out Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for not acting like the other platforms.
He still has a blue check on @Twitter. Your move, @jack. Be a leader with integrity like @tim_cook
— Ellen K. Pao (@ekp) August 6, 2018
Infowars may have lost millions of subscribers across these platforms, but it is far from finished. Infowar.com gets an estimated 3.6 million unique visits per month. And no one is more aware of this than host Alex Jones himself. Here is his response to ‘Big Tech’s Coordinated Censorship’ of his content. It is full of conspiratorial nonsense about how the Democrats, corporations and Communist China are teaming up together silence Infowars. And of course, it’s hosted on Twitter, it’s only remaining social channel:
Alex Jones Official Response To Big Tech's Coordinated Censorship/ Deplatform Purge
?Tune in M-F 11am-3pm central at: https://t.co/OQtch0tDED ⬅️ #AlexJonesShow #TuesdayThoughts #Censorship? #infowars #1A
?Download: https://t.co/3x2h5pP4Yg https://t.co/itByQiWpar
— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) August 7, 2018
Alex Jones is clearly either mentally ill or completely indifferent to the truth. The 1st Amendment does protect free speech but when your words are not just obscene but repeatedly defamatory (Sandy Hook) and lead to mass disinformation and violence (Pizzagate), there is a problem. The paranoid and nonsensical rantings of Infowars each night can easily be interpreted as yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater, and in infowar’s case it’s a theater of millions across our country. But, on the other side of this debate is the idea that banning any speech sets a dangerous precedent.
Not only could this power be used to silence truth tellers in the future, but it is a power wielded by an unelected group of corporations. This brings up the unprecedented and unbridled power wielded by ‘Big Tech,’ and the trust we continually place in their hands. Not only do we give them our personal data every day in exchange for access, we give them the power to regulate and censor what we watch and consume. So who is watching the watchers? Ironically these types of questions are explored ad nauseam on programs like Infowars…shows that are now being silenced.
