Alex Jones blasted tech companies removing Infowars from their platforms Monday in a live stream on Twitter’s Periscope service.
Screenshot by Joan E. Solsman/CNET
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is quickly disappearing from the internet, though some accesses to his site Infowars is still available on the web.
Pinterest is the latest platform to take down Infowars’ page on Monday after multiple people flagged the conspiracy theory account to the company.
“Consistent with our existing policies, we take action against accounts that repeatedly save content that could lead to harm,” a Pinterest spokesperson said in an email statement. “People come to Pinterest to discover ideas for their lives, and we continue to enforce our principles to maintain a safe, useful and inspiring experience for our users.”
InfoWars had a Pinterest page before it was taken down on Monday.
Internet Archive
Earlier four tech giants — Apple, Facebook, Google’s YouTube and Spotify — cracked down on Jones’s notorious conspiracy media empire Infowars. Apple confirmed on Sunday that it had removed five of the six podcasts that InfoWars created. Spotify removed podcasts linked to Jones on Monday.
Facebook said on Monday that it had removed the Alex Jones Channel Page, the Alex Jones Page, the Infowars Page and the Infowars Nightly New Page. YouTube removed one of Jones’s biggest channel — The Alex Jones Channel with 2.4 million subscribers — on Monday.
Jones has been widely criticized for promoting untrue conspiracies about tragic events like the 2001 terrorist attacks on World Trade Center in New York that killed almost 3,000 people, and the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut that killed 26 students and staff.
The notorious conspiracist and his supporters have called the removal of Jones’s contents a “coordinated communist-style crackdown” to suppress them, according to InfoWars’s statement in a report leading its website.
However, the Infowars app is still available on iOS App Store, Google Play store, and its accounts are still active on LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter.
Infowars app is still available on iOS App Store.
Screenshot by CNET
InfoWars app is still available on Google Play Store.
Screenshot by CNET
Infowars accounts are still active on Twitter because they currently don’t violate Twitter’s policies, according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking. The social network sees the current counter arguments posted in InfoWars’s threads as healthy corrections of public discourse.
Apple, Google, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Instagram didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Alex Jones and InfoWars also didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
CNET’s Ian Sherr contributed to reporting.
