Alex Jones pleads with Donald Trump to fight 'censorship' after Infowars host is banned by YouTube and Facebook

Conspiracy theorist praises president and accuses China of meddling in US elections in free-wheeling monologue

Harriet Agerholm
Tuesday 07 August 2018 16:51 BST
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Far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones appeals to Donald Trump to pursue an 'end to censorship'

Far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has appealed to Donald Trump to pursue an end to “censorship” after the InfoWars host was banned from all but one of the West’s major content platforms.

On Monday, Apple deleted most of Mr Jones’s podcasts saying they contained hate speech; Facebook removed four of his pages down for “repeated violations of community standards”; YouTube terminated Mr Jones’s account after he violated a 90-day ban; and Spotify removed one of Jones’s podcasts for “hate content”.

In a free-wheeling monologue posted online, the prominent far-right personality praised the president, condemned the mainstream press, and accused China of meddling in US elections.

“Mr President, America knows you’re real. They know the Democrats are the anti-American globalists allied with the ChiComms, radical Islam, the unelected EU, and others,” he said.

“If you come out before the midterms and make the censorship the big issue of them trying to steal the election.

“And if you make the fact we need an Internet Bill of Rights, and anti-trust busting on these companies, if they don’t back off right now.

“And if you don’t come out and point out that the communist Chinese have penetrated and infiltrated and are way, way worse than the Russians .... then they will be able to steal the midterms and start the impeachment.”

He said cracking down on China and speaking out against censorship was “the right thing to do”.

“Now you’ve stepped in and the country is coming back from the dead, they’re desperate to stop it,” he said.

“They’re trying to stop you and every American from having their free speech by defaming me, lying about what I have done, [George] Soros financing fake law suits to give it legitimacy and now de-platforming me ... cause the lawsuits are all getting thrown out.”

The video cannot be viewed on YouTube or Facebook, but it is still available via Media Matters, a non-profit organisation with the stated aim of “comprehensively monitoring, analysing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the US media”.

Following the removal of Mr Jones’s Facebook pages, a spokesperson for the company said: “More content from the same pages has been reported to us – upon review, we have taken it down for glorifying violence, which violates our graphic violence policy, and using dehumanising language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants, which violates our hate speech policies.”

They added that despite pressure to remove Mr Jones’s content for spreading conspiracy theories about events including the 9/11 terror attacks and Sandy Hook school shooting, “none of the violations that spurred today’s removals were related to this”.

Mr Jones is currently being sued by the parents of children murdered in the Sandy Hook shooting for claiming the attack was a hoax.

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