Facebook, Apple, and YouTube officially ban Infowars & Alex Jones

Its official Infowas has been officially banned from all major platforms. YouTube bans Alex Jones, following Facebook and Apple’s lead citing user agreement policies against hate speech and harassment.

As companies raced to act in the wake of Apple’s decision to remove five podcasts by Jones and his Infowars website from their platform. Facebook then unpublished four pages run by Jones for “repeated violations of community standards”. YouTube terminated Jones’s account over him repeatedly appearing in videos despite being subject to a 90-day ban from the website, and Spotify removed the entirety of a single one of Jones’s podcasts for what they deemed as “hate content”.

All users agree to comply with our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines when they sign up to use YouTube," a YouTube spokesperson told [Ars on Monday.]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/youtube-bans-alex-jones-following-facebook-and-apples-lead/

Prior to being shut down hut down the Infowars main channel had more than 2.4 million subscribers, and Jones's videos had racked up over close to 1.5 billion views.

Facebook and Apple purge Alex Jones, but Infowars still has huge reach.This is either a major blow to free speech and another attack on independent media, or its an elaborate game of wag the dog, where Jones is a dissinfo agent and the bans are to give him clout and drive infowars followers into one place. As of right now I am lost for words. No matter what side of the divide you reside, if you love Jones or hate him, this is a major blow towards the alternative media, and represents the next step of suppression by those who want the news to be controlled by a central source. I don't know what the answers are, like most things the situation is complicated, I do know that censorship and more government are not the answer, raising awareness to the situation is.