YouTube removes Alex Jones from platform, cites ban evasion

Alex Jones will no longer have a home on YouTube.

The company announced Monday that it has removed Jones — a prominent far-right personality who runs the InfoWars channel, which is known for pushing inflammatory content and conspiracy theories — from its platform.

A YouTube spokesperson issued the following statement concerning Jones’ removal:

All users agree to comply with our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines when they sign up to use YouTube. When users violate these policies repeatedly, like our policies against hate speech and harassment or our terms prohibiting circumvention of our enforcement measures, we terminate their accounts.

YouTube’s decision to terminate Jones’ account comes after he tried to circumvent a 90-day livestreaming ban by promoting a different livestream on other channels. After giving Jones a warning, the company learned of the violation, and saw fit to terminate the channel.

Jones called the move an act of censorship on Twitter, and will respond to YouTube’s decision via a livestream on Periscope.

YouTube’s decision to shut down InfoWars’ channel follows the decision by a number of major tech platforms to begin removing Jones’ content. In the past few days, Apple, Spotify and Facebook have each removed InfoWars from their platforms. All three companies cited the hateful content found in Jones’ InfoWars videos and on his podcast, saying that it violates the platforms’ respective community guidelines. For Facebook, the decision comes in the wake of repeated online protests over allowing Jones to publish hateful content.

Just a few weeks ago, Jones “issued a prolonged rant against special counsel Robert Mueller, accusing him of raping children and overseeing their rape, and then pantomiming shooting the former FBI director,” according to BuzzFeed News. A Facebook representative later told BuzzFeed News, “Jones’ comments do not violate the company’s community standards as they are not a credible statement of intent to commit violence.”

Facebook cited new information in its decision to remove Jones’ pages.

“More content from the same pages has been reported to us — upon review, 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,” a spokesperson told The Guardian.

Apple issued a similar statement to BuzzFeed News this weekend.

“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 spokesperson for Apple told BuzzFeed News.