Conspiracy theorist and fake news promoter Alex Jones is now wrongly claiming First Amendment “censorship,” after major social media outlets pulled the plug on his podcasts and videos, including those from his InfoWars brand. Jones on Monday was booted from Apple’s iTunes, Spotify, Facebook, and YouTube, primarily, the companies said, for repeatedly posting hate speech.
“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 said in a statement Monday after canceling his channel, which had over 2.4 million subscribers.
Jones made the false “censorship” claim late Tuesday afternoon via Twitter, from which he has yet to be banned, despite his videos being posted to that social media company’s Periscope video platform.
But, as it turns out, Jones should have been banned from his own website, based on his own InfoWars Terms of Service (TOS), the rules of behavior for people who post.
“You will not post anything libelous, defamatory, harmful, threatening, harassing, abusive, invasive of another’s privacy, hateful, racially or ethnically objectionable, or otherwise illegal,” InfoWars says in its Terms of Service (archived version – NCRM will not link to InfoWars.)
“If you violate these rules, your posts and/or user name will be deleted,” it adds – which is what Jones did. In fact, some of his content was exceptionally hateful, as a just-released NBC News report says of Jones’ anti-LGBT remarks, for example.
But here’s the section of InfoWars’ TOS that shows the conspiracy theorist and fake news maven’s true hypocrisy, as many on Twitter have been only too happy to point out:
“Remember: you are a guest here. It is not censorship if you violate the rules and your post is deleted. All civilizations have rules and if you violate them you can expect to be ostracized from the tribe.”
That’s what happened to Alex Jones on Monday. He violated the rules and his posts were deleted. He has effectively been “ostracized.”