Facebook purged 22 pages Tuesday associated with Infowars, a website run by right-wing media personality Alex Jones, six months after the social network punted several related accounts for repeatedly violating the platform’s rules.
The pages were among a total of 89 removed by Facebook in an effort to enforce its recently updated recidivism policy, said a spokesperson for the social network.
Facebook removed four pages associated with Infowars and Mr. Jones in August 2018, citing repeated violations of the platform’s community standards and rules against hate speech, graphic violence and bullying.
More recently, Facebook announced last month that it had revised its recidivism policy in order to explicitly prohibit the administrators of previously banned accounts “from using duplicate Pages to continue the same activity.”
Each of the 22 pages related to Infowars banned Tuesday were administered by Facebook users who previously administered pages unpublished in August, a Facebook spokesperson told The Washington Times.
“We use a broad set of signals to determine if a Page violates our recidivism policy and determined these Pages violated our policy for reasons including having similar titles to the Pages we unpublished and having the same admins,” the Facebook spokesperson said.
Infowars identified the purged Facebook pages as “Infowars Podcasts,” “Infowars Connections,” “Planet Infowars,” “Infowar Books,” “Infowars App” and “Infowars Magazine,” among others, including “WarRoom,” the page for a internet program frequently co-hosted by Roger Stone, President Trump’s former election campaign adviser who was recently charged as a result of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 elections.
“The censorship of the WarRoom is part and parcel of the insidious effort to limit my First Amendment rights and attempt to ensure that there is no platform on which I can fully defend myself,” Mr. Stone told The Washington Times. “It is a violation of current antitrust law and very similar to the ongoing efforts to ban Alex Jones from every public platform. Why do liberals hear the truth?”
“What do we do at this point?” Mr. Jones, 44, asked Monday during an episode of his syndicated radio and internet program. “Because I’m ready for war but I don’t want to prosecute this war improperly.”
The related accounts unpublished from Facebook last year included the Alex Jones Channel Page, the Alex Jones Page, the InfoWars Page and the Infowars Nightly News Page. They were all unpublished from the platform last summer within weeks of Infowars and Mr. Jones being similarly punted off services operated by Twitter, Google’s YouTube, Spotify and PayPal, among other major internet companies.
Mr. Jones has not been personally banned from Facebook and maintains an active account on the service.
Widely considered a conspiracy theorist, Mr. Jones gained notoriety over his past coverage of tragedies including the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass-shooting in 2012. He is currently being sued for defamation and other counts by lawyers representing the relatives of several victims killed during the school suiting in a lawsuit that alleges a “yearslong campaign of abusive and outrageous false statements.”
Mr. Stone, 66, was criminally charged last month with seven counts of lying to Congress, obstruction and witness tampering. He pleaded not guilty and has been released on bond.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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