Facebook has announced that it has removed four pages of Alex Jones, a US conspiracy theorist, for violation of its policy that bans extremist behaviour, including hate speech. Facebook has banned four videos on four of its Facebook pages identified as the Alex Jones Channel Page, the Alex Jones Page, the InfoWars Page and the Infowars Nightly News 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,” Facebook said in a statement.
The social media giant also said it has been pursuing a policy that wants “everyone using Facebook to feel safe. It’s why we have Community Standards and remove anything that violates them, including hate speech that attacks or dehumanizes others.” As of now, Jones has been banned from posting violating content on his Facebook pages for a period of 30 days, says the Facebook statement.
Jones is a conspiracy theorist who is known to have claimed that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which occurred on December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut, was nothing more than a hoax. He denied that the said shooting, which had reportedly killed 20 students and six school staffers, ever occurred. He even asserted that it was “completely fake”.
The four pages have reportedly broken Facebook’s graphic violence policy by using “dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, muslims and immigrants”. After it blocked Jones pages, Facebook says, it received more extremist content from the very same pages that were earlier taken down for glorifying violence.
Apart from Facebook, Jones has also been banned from other major social media platforms such as Apple and Google-owned YouTube. On Monday, Apple confirmed that it had taken down five podcasts of Jones’ infamous “The Alex Jones Show” and a number of other audio streams from his right-wing media platform InfoWars. Apple states that Jones’ podcasts violated its guidelines and had to be accordingly removed from its directory “making them no longer searchable or available for download or streaming”.