Apple, Facebook and Spotify took further steps over the weekend to clamp down on Alex Jones, dropping more of his content from its platforms and further squeezing the notable web conspiracist’s online reach.
On Monday, Facebook — which had already slapped a 30-day suspension on Alex Jones’ personal Facebook page — removed a number of official InfoWars related pages, including “The Infowars Nightly News” “The Alex Jones Page” “Infowars Page” and the “Alex Jones Channel Page.”
“Earlier today, we removed four Pages belonging to Alex Jones for repeatedly posting content over the past several days that breaks those Community Standards,” said the company in a public statement Monday.
“All four Pages have been unpublished for repeated violations of Community Standards and accumulating too many strikes,” the statement continued. “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.”
Facebook also clarified that its decision to get rid of Jones’ content was related only to specific violations of community standards and not to his long history of propagating false information on the platform.
Apple removed five of six InfoWars podcasts, including its signature “Alex Jones Show.”
“Apple does not tolerate hate speech, and we have clear guidelines that creators and developers must follow to ensure we provide a safe environment for all of our users,” a company spokesperson told BuzzFeed. “Podcasts that violate these guidelines are removed from our directory making them no longer searchable or available for download or streaming. We believe in representing a wide range of views, so long as people are respectful to those with differing opinions.”
BuzzFeed also confirmed that Spotify has completely removed the “Alex Jones Show” from its platform. Last week, after a pressure campaign, the streamer deleted a number of select episodes of the show.
“We take reports of hate content seriously and review any podcast episode or song that is flagged by our community,” a rep for the company told TheWrap at the time.
It’s unclear how Jones will respond to his latest troubles. In a statement to TheWrap, the InfoWars chief accused China and George Soros of being behind the effort to silence him.
“China pulls the strings of big tech now. Choose a side. Soros is proud of you,” Jones said via text, which also included a Chinese flag emoji.
Reps for Spotify and Apple did not immediately respond to request for comment, while Facebook referred TheWrap to its public statement.