- The Washington Times - Friday, July 13, 2018

Facebook has come under fire for permitting InfoWars, a website run by right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, to maintain a presence on the web’s largest social networking site.

Speaking at an event held Wednesday to tout the company’s fight against fight fake news, Facebook executive John Hegeman said InfoWars is nonetheless allowed to operate an official “page” on the platform because it has “not violated something that would result in them being taken down,” CNN first reported.

“I guess, just for being false, that doesn’t violate the community standards,” said Mr. Hegeman, the vice president in charge of Facebook’s News Feed feature.

The home of articles with headlines such as “FBI Says No One Killed at Sandy Hook” and “Hillary Clinton: Demonic Warmonger,” Facebook’s rationale for providing a platform for InfoWars in spite of its reputation for publishing false and misleading content spurred heated reactions on social media afterwards from critics who want it banned outright.

“We see Pages on both the left and the right pumping out what they consider opinion or analysis — but others call fake news. We believe banning these Pages would be contrary to the basic principles of free speech,” Facebook responded Thursday.

“The question we face is whether to ban a Page for peddling information debunked by fact-checkers or to demote it so fewer people see it,” Facebook said through its Twitter account. “We believe the better approach is to demote fake news posts, and the Pages that spread them. These guys are allowed YouTube and Twitter accounts too — we imagine for the same reason.”

Mr. Jones, 44, launched the InfoWars website in 1999. The site’s Facebook page is currently followed by over 900,000 users, and the main YouTube account associated with “The Alex Jones Show,” his syndicated radio program, boasts more than 2.4 million subscribers.

Reached by The Washington Times on Friday, Mr. Jones said that Facebook’s habit of demoting InfoWars content has resulted in its articles reaching 80 percent fewer Facebook users than in 2016.

“Everyone is basically paying off the pirate, and in the end the pirate is going to end up robbing everyone of their free speech,” Mr. Jones told The Times.

President Trump appeared on “The Alex Jones Show” while campaigning in 2015 and told the host: “Your reputation is amazing.” Litigation pending in several states paint a different picture of Mr. Jones, however, including a defamation suit filed earlier this month on behalf of the relative of a person killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass-shooting in 2012 — a massacre Mr. Jones once described as “a giant hoax.”

“Jones has accused Sandy Hook families, who are readily identifiable, of faking their loved ones’ deaths, and insisted that the children killed that day are actually alive … as part of a marketing scheme that has brought him and his business entities tens of millions of dollars per year,” the lawsuit says.

Mr. Jones told The Times that his past comments about Sandy Hook, as well as the so-called “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that claimed a pedophile ring was operated beneath a D.C. pizzeria, have been misconstrued by the “mainstream fake news” because “they don’t want someone countering the lies they are putting out.”

Facebook outright banning InfoWars would make Mr. Jones “a sacrificial lamb,” he told The Times.

Speaking during Thursday’s episode of “The Alex Jones Show,” he cited an “concerted effort to fundamentally change the architecture of the internet and ban conservatives, nationalists, libertarians, Christians, gun owners, you name it, from access to most major platforms.”

• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.

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