Facebook Follows YouTube's Lead, Blocks Alex Jones' Pages

[Anti Globalist]

People are posting Infowars content on porn sites? Well people got to get off on something.

 

[AuH20]

 

[AuH20]

What is this?

 

[nikcers]

My favorite conspiracy theory was they targeted Alex Jones and had all of that Mark Zuckerberg political theater in order to promote government solutions to government created social media monopolies.

 

[AuH20]

 

[AuH20]

 

[AuH20]

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/08/meet-jared-holt-guy-whos-getting-alex-jones-kicked-off-internet/

You’ve been following Infowars for a long time and researching them. So I guess I want to ask you bluntly: Do you think Alex Jones is just pretending to believe this crap, or does he really believe it?

I think Alex Jones is probably caught in his own feedback loop at this point. I think he believes in the classic right-wing conspiracy theory, this idea that “globalists” are working to subvert Western culture.

Through the audience and the reward system he’s built for himself at Infowars throughout the years, he has an incentive, resulting directly to his pocketbook, to give his audience the red meat.

I think I can’t peer into Alex Jones’ brain and tell you 100 percent whether or not he believes in all of this. But he definitely has a financial reward system, and I guess an audience, that provides motivation for him behaving the way he does on air.

We're all hallucinating then. All the periodicals, the public statements and the white papers?

 

[devil21]

What is this?

Propaganda mainly. Looks like something someone put together in mspaint. When you consider that all of these social media outlets are controlled by deep state elements, this censorship goes way above some random grassroots political organization.

 

[devil21]

My favorite conspiracy theory was they targeted Alex Jones and had all of that Mark Zuckerberg political theater in order to promote government solutions to government created social media monopolies.

Shit, I meant to +rep you. I think I negged you accidentally. Sorry!!

 

[AuH20]

Propaganda mainly. Looks like something someone put together in mspaint. When you consider that all of these social media outlets are controlled by deep state elements, this censorship goes way above some random grassroots political organization.

I agree. We have the Nato backed Atlantic Council advising Facebook on their guidelines. But maybe that edict filters down to this level. Who knows?

 

[dannno]

How good is Ron Paul's message when its sandwiched between 2 fat layers of disinfo news?

Which of his stories that he hasn't redacted (happens rarely, less than msm) was disinfo news?

If you go to the site on a random day and there are 12 stories on the front page, how many do you presume are disinfo?

 

[AuH20]

These activists or deep state protagonists are attempting to get Alex Jones thrown from his internet hosting service contracts, citing the storage of child pornography, the sale of contraband and other criminal violations.

 

[AuH20]

The current list of sites that have banned Jones:

Facebook
YouTube
Apple
Google Podcast
Spotify
TuneIn
Spreaker
iHeartRadio
Audioboom
Pinterest
MailChimp
Stitcher
Disqus
Sprout Social
LinkedIn
…YouPorn?

 

[Carlybee]

Maybe Bryan can host Alex Jones vids here...two birds one stone.

 

[Brian4Liberty]

https://www.texasobserver.org/first...crusade-against-facebook-reaches-new-extreme/

There’s no shortage of Republicans who harp about how social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter — those overzealous bastions of Silicon Valley liberalism — are engaged in a conspiratorial plot to muzzle the political speech of those on the right.

On this front, perhaps no politician has been more vocal and sanctimonious than Senator Ted Cruz. And he’s taking his virtuous crusade against Facebook’s political persecution of conservatives to new extremes, by tethering it to a vehement defense of the Austin conspiracy theorist and radio host Alex Jones. When the social media giant decided to temporarily suspend Jones’s personal account in late July, Cruz was moved to speak out.

Predictably, he took an immense amount of flak for defending Jones, who is currently fighting defamation charges in court for peddling the stunning nonsense that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a government hoax. That’s just one in a long list of vile and dangerous theories — remember Pizzagate? — that Jones’ fringy media empire InfoWars has perpetuated over the years.

Am no fan of Jones — among other things he has a habit of repeatedly slandering my Dad by falsely and absurdly accusing him of killing JFK — but who the hell made Facebook the arbiter of political speech? Free speech includes views you disagree with. #1A https://t.co/RC5v4SHaiI

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) July 28, 2018​

But Cruz is not backing down. In an interview with reporters at the conservative Resurgent Gathering in Austin on Saturday, Cruz cast himself as the righteous defender of the First Amendment and free speech — including “offensive speech, bad speech, stupid speech” — and bemoaned liberals and the media for not joining him in his principled defense of Jones. (It’s worth noting that the moderation policies of a private corporation like Facebook are not a First Amendment issue.)

“As the poem goes, you know, first they came for Alex Jones. That does not end well,” Cruz said, referencing the famous Martin Niemöller poem about German cowardice in the face of ascendant Nazism. Apparently in this metaphor, Facebook is the Nazis and Jones is… the socialists?

“There’s a reason I picked someone who has been nasty to me: to illustrate this is not about defending someone I agree with,” Cruz said. “This is a First Amendment principle that everyone has a right to speak, and people can sort out those who are making sense from those who are full of crap.”

 

[Brian4Liberty]

Meet Jared Holt, the guy who’s getting Alex Jones kicked off the internet
Jared Holt helped lead the pressure campaign to get Infowars booted from Spotify, Facebook and other platforms
Amanda Marcotte - August 8, 2018

Alex Jones is having a rough week. The Texas-based conspiracy theorist and head of the disturbingly popular Infowars media empire has been banned in rapid succession from a variety of platforms, including Apple, YouTube, Facebook and Spotify.

To many casual news consumers, the purge seems sudden. Jones has been peddling mean-spirited hoaxes for years, including 9/11 "truther" nonsense, false accusations of pedophilia aimed at a broad set of targets (including special counsel Robert Mueller), and hyping the idea that the bereaved parents of kids killed in the Sandy Hook massacre are fakers — the latter of which has led to a defamation lawsuit that could cost the Infowars host millions of dollars. So why now?

The timing isn't random. In recent weeks, a group of progressive activists has dialed up efforts to pressure these distribution platforms to drop Infowars. That pressure, which comes at a time when court proceedings against Jones have finally begun in earnest, created the momentum that led to this decision. This has been mentioned in passing in much of the coverage, but these folks deserve much more credit and recognition for the work they've been doing in trying to fight right-wing disinformation campaigns.

Salon spoke recently with Jared Holt, a researcher from Right Wing Watch, a project of People for the American Way. Holt's work has been instrumental in getting social media and other internet platforms to give Infowars the boot. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I follow you on Twitter and noticed that you seemed to be spearheading the effort to kick Alex Jones off Spotify. Am I right in this assumption?

I first brought attention to the fact that Spotify was hosting Infowars’ programming and tweeted about it. That was amplified by the progressive group Sleeping Giants, which brought it into the national attention, from my relatively niche Twitter account. People were upset and threatened to boycott Spotify. That got the attention of reporters who asked Spotify about it. Then I also wrote an article laying out the case for why Infowars clearly violates Spotify’s own hosting rules.

Why did you decide to target Spotify? Alex Jones is being distributed all over, as we've come to realize.

I’m not sure it was really a calculated effort. I use Spotify to listen to music while I work. I noticed they had a podcast section, so I was looking through that. When I found Infowars, I was surprised -- mostly because of my own experience as someone who has a podcast, aside from my work with Right Wing Watch. I experienced a personal struggle to get Spotify to list my own podcast.

I guess I was a little bit offended that Alex Jones was able to get on the air and I wasn’t.

Did Spotify respond to your complaints directly?

No. I reached out to Spotify for comments on my original stories about the ways that Infowars violates the terms of service. Although I was the first person, to my knowledge, to ask them about this, they never responded to me.

It seems like there was a snowball effect that took place after this happened. Jones got booted one outlet and then the rest followed, stampede-style. Why was this the tipping point?

For a long time, people have been frustrated, particularly with Facebook and YouTube hosting Infowars. Those sites nearly broke their backs to come up with reasons why Infowars should be exempt from the same user policy enacted on everybody else that uses the platform.

Maybe adding Spotify and Apple to this discussion underlined exactly how legitimate the concerns of the people who were upset by this were.

Why do you think Facebook resisted kicking Jones off for so long?

To be just totally blunt, I think Facebook was afraid to take action.

Ever since the internet began, there’s been the existential question over how much responsibility platforms have for the content that its users generate. The internet started as a radical experiment in free speech, and I think early on, we saw the benefits of that more clearly. I’m thinking back to events like the Arab Spring and that sort of stuff, to see what a free and open internet could do for democracy at large and on the world stage.

But over the past couple of years, we’ve experienced the negative effects. We were spoiled by the good before we saw the ugly. I think because of that, there is sort of a fear -- not just at Facebook, but with other tech companies as well -- that restricting pages gets attention.

They also would be subject to backlash from millions of people who keep up with Infowars and support Infowars.

You work at Right Wing Watch and People for the American Way by tracking right-wing misinformation sites. Why is it so important to go after these guys? What danger do they present to the public?

It's in the name of Infowars. It’s not an attempt at legitimate reporting. It's a, quote, "war" for your mind.
...
More: https://www.salon.com/2018/08/08/me...s-getting-alex-jones-kicked-off-the-internet/

 

[DamianTV]

What happens next? Will you be refused to access your Bank Acct because of your political or religious views?

We know it starts with Alex and ends with censoring every individual, with Ron Paul Forums somewhere in between. What happens after that? Will you be fired from your job for not being a Libtard? Will your rental application be denied? Will you fail a class because your neighbor listened to Alex? Maybe it will extend well beyond the Private Sector and reach Govt levels, where you are denied to vote because you wont vote for a particular Neocon that you were told to vote for? Maybe you will be imprisoned? Maybe you will be denied permission to have children? Maybe we really will all end up in FEMA Camps, or some other Reeducation Facility? Maybe they will just flat out kill you for being a white male?

There are a bunch of things going on here:

• Censorship (obvious)
• Self Censorship
• Gerrymandering
• Pushing for Democratic Landslide
• Election Interference
• Brainwashing
• Normalizing Censorship
• Normalizing Extremism of Leftist Policies
• Manufacture Artificial Conflict
• Rewriting and Censorship of History
• Civil War
• World War
• Depopulation
• Population Enslavement
• Elimination of ALL Human Rights
• Technocratic Replacement of Government (AI replaces Politicians and Courts)
• Collapse Western Civilization

Every potential next step gets progressively worse and exceedingly more dangerous. And all of these actions are supported by large groups of people who do so with the approval of their own twisted morals, so they sleep like babies at night when endorsing unprecedented levels of violence against others. I do not advocate violence, yet, they push the most oppressive forms of violence against all others. The only possible long term outcome of this they enact extreme violence against us. If you tried to support Black Lives Matter by saying ALL Lives Matter and condemn violence in any form, then you are racist. Read between the lines of "Black Lives Matter" and you will find what is not written, which is nothing short of "Your LIFE does NOT matter".

The reason they start with censorship of Conspiracy Theorists is because sometimes the Conspiracy Theorist is right.

 

[devil21]

Which of his stories that he hasn't redacted (happens rarely, less than msm) was disinfo news?

If you go to the site on a random day and there are 12 stories on the front page, how many do you presume are disinfo?

Come on, AJ/IW has turned into MSM-lite. Every story on IW front page right now is some derivative of an MSM item, just spun a bit for the low-info faux CT "Q" believing crowd. I'm struggling to figure out why anyone in power would think he needs to be silenced. It's not like he's producing End Game and Obama Deception type videos any more.

 

[AuH20]

Come on, AJ/IW has turned into MSM-lite. Every story on IW front page right now is some derivative of an MSM item, just spun a bit for the low-info faux CT "Q" believing crowd. I'm struggling to figure out why anyone in power would think he needs to be silenced. It's not like he's producing End Game and Obama Deception type videos any more.

He's being silenced because of his sources. He's still the only game in town, in terms of an independent publisher. If you have serious dirt on a governmental agency, your options are severely limited. Like Jones or not, he has significant clout to break stories.

 

[devil21]

He's being silenced because of his sources. He's still the only game in town, in terms of an independent publisher. If you have serious dirt on a governmental agency, your options are severely limited. Like Jones or not, he has significant clout to break stories.

He does indeed have a large megaphone but breaking stories that no one else touches is something he hasn't done in a long time. If it's his reach that is being silenced then something very newsworthy and ripe for conspiratorial commentary isn't far off. However, it seems to me that silencing IW is a big distraction from the much wider silencing going on of smaller, independent-thinking media voices and AJ is just sucking all of the air out of the room with his saga. I barely see a peep about the others that have been shut down and will continue to be shut down. It's those smaller outlets that make up the network of independent news and commentary, not really AJ/IW anymore.