Apple, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest and Spotify clamped down on content by Alex Jones Monday. Apple confirmed on Monday that it had removed five out of Jones' six podcasts, which includes the infamous "The Alex Jones Show" as well as a number of other InfoWars audio streams. The news was originally reported by BuzzFeed News. Facebook and Google made similar decisions later on Monday. Facebook removed four pages controlled by him, while Google removed the official "Alex Jones Channel" on its platform. The YouTube channel for InfoWars, the media company owned by Alex Jones, still remains live. Pinterest also removed the InfoWars board, while Spotify took down his most well-known show completely. Jones, a controversial conspiracy theorist who has claimed that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, had recently been hit by warnings and content removals from online platforms. Apple took down entire libraries of InfoWars podcasts. Spotify last week only removed a select few episodes, but on Monday pulled Jones' "The Alex Jones Show." "Apple does not tolerate hate speech, and we have clear guidelines that creators and developers must follow to ensure we provide a safe environment for all of our users," an Apple spokesperson said in a statement on Monday. "Podcasts that violate these guidelines are removed from our directory making them no longer searchable or available for download or streaming. We believe in representing a wide range of views, so long as people are respectful to those with differing opinions." On Friday, Apple officially became the first publicly-listed U.S. company to reach a market capitalization of $1 trillion. Facebook ban Later on Monday morning, Facebook announced it was removing four of Jones' pages for persistently uploading content in breach of the social network's content guidelines. The company said it made the decision after receiving additional complaints about inappropriate content on Jones' pages. The pages were removed "for glorifying violence, which violates our graphic violence policy, and using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants, which violates our hate speech policies." The decision was made independently of any other companies removing content from their sites, a Facebook spokesperson said. In July, Facebook removed four of Jones' videos and hit his own personal profile with a 30-day ban over what the firm deemed as a violation of its policies on bullying and hate speech. The company said at the time the official InfoWars page, among others where Jones was an administrator, were getting close to the threshold of being banned from the site due to repeated violations. The company explained on Monday that when it deletes content, the removal counts as a strike — essentially a warning — against the person that uploaded it. In the case of pages, Facebook said it holds both a page and an administrator who posts content in violation of its rules accountable. But it also said that the reason for removing Jones' pages was in no way related to concerns over fake news. "All four pages have been unpublished for repeated violations of Community Standards and accumulating too many strikes," the company said in a blog post. "While much of the discussion around Infowars has been related to false news, which is a serious issue that we are working to address by demoting links marked wrong by fact checkers and suggesting additional content, none of the violations that spurred today's removals were related to this." Facebook in particular has faced calls to remove Jones from the platform altogether. Last month, the company was asked by a CNN journalist why it had not banned InfoWars completely, given its aim to crack down on fake news. Facebook — along with CEO Mark Zuckerberg — defended the decision not to remove InfoWars. Tech giants have faced calls from both sides of the political spectrum to be more transparent about the way they approach content flagging and banning. On the left, there are critics who say these firms are not doing enough to take down harmful and offensive content, while on the right there are some who think internet firms are routinely censoring conservative posts. As private companies, there is nothing in law to bar them from removing user-generated videos and audio as they see fit. But a number of mostly conservative commentators have framed the issue as a matter of freedom of speech. YouTube YouTube removed Jones' official channel later Monday morning. "All users agree to comply with our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines when they sign up to use YouTube," a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement. "When users violate these policies repeatedly, like our policies against hate speech and harassment or our terms prohibiting circumvention of our enforcement measures, we terminate their accounts." Jones publishes many of the same videos that violated Facebook's policies to YouTube. YouTube has taken action against Jones in the past, including removing some of his videos. He was barred from live streaming for violating YouTube policies, but continued to live stream on other channels, according to YouTube. His actions led the company to remove his official account. Pinterest Pinterest removed the official InfoWars board on Monday afternoon after multiple people alerted the company to policy violations. "Consistent with our existing policies, we take action against accounts that repeatedly save content that could lead to harm," a Pinterest spokesperson said. "People come to Pinterest to discover ideas for their lives, and we continue to enforce our principles to maintain a safe, useful and inspiring experience for our users." Spotify Spotify last week pulled several of Jones' podcast episodes, citing the violation of its policies on hateful content. On Monday, however, the streaming service completely removed "The Alex Jones Show" from the platform, a spokesperson for the company told CNBC. Spotify continued to review the podcast over the weekend and arrived at the conclusion that enough of it went against its code on hateful content to warrant a complete deletion of the show. Spotify's policies mean that more than one contravention can result in a podcast creator being barred from the platform altogether. The company had been confronted with the threat of some users leaving the platform for not being tough enough on the right-wing online personality. Twitter Jones responded to the bans Monday in a series of tweets and a live stream on Periscope, which is owned by Twitter. His accounts for both platforms remained up and active through the day. Twitter takes action on content that is flagged for abuse or other violations of company policy, the company told CNBC, but InfoWars and its associated accounts had yet to violate the guidelines for either platform. Those accounts will remain active for now. Tech's politics problem The problem of online political content as a whole has proven to be a contentious one for digital companies. Two weeks ago, Facebook faced the biggest one-day market rout in history, shedding more than $100 billion from its market value in the space of just one trading day. That followed concerns that the company's data scandal, in which the data of 87 million users were shared improperly with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, had affected second-quarter revenues. Issues around data privacy and fake news have become almost intertwined as politicians and regulators examine how to deal with claims that digital platforms were used as a tool to influence major elections including the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the U.K. Brexit referendum. Therefore, tech firms have been at the center of the debacle, with analysts questioning whether they could be the target of increased regulation. In May, the European Union put in place its huge data law shake-up, dubbed GDPR (the General Data Protection Regulation, requiring companies to obtain explicit consent from customers as to how their data is used, or else face a fine of either 20 million euros ($23 million) or 4 percent of their global annual revenues. - Additional reporting by CNBC's Michelle Castillo, Sara Salinas, Sally Shin and Steve Kovach WATCH: Why Facebook's business model is only now coming under fire<doc-sep>YouTube has removed Alex Jones' page, following bans earlier Monday from Apple and Facebook. The Alex Jones Channel, which counts 2.4 million subscribers, still appeared in YouTube search results by midday Monday, but presented only a take-down notice when users clicked in. "This account has been terminated for violating YouTube's Community Guidelines," the notice said. Google had previously declined to comment on the InfoWars host's standing, but said in a statement to CNBC in response to the removal of the page: "All users agree to comply with our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines when they sign up to use YouTube. When users violate these policies repeatedly, like our policies against hate speech and harassment or our terms prohibiting circumvention of our enforcement measures, we terminate their accounts." YouTube counts "strikes" against pages for posts that violate the company's policies. Jones received a strike in July when he posted four videos that violated YouTube policies against child endangerment and hate speech, the company said in a statement to CNBC. A page with one strike against it is suspended from live streaming for 90 days, YouTube said, but Jones attempted to circumvent the suspension by live streaming on other channels. As a result, his page was terminated, the company said. The InfoWars YouTube page, which has significantly fewer subscribers, was still live as of noon ET. Jones and his controversial radio show have for several weeks been at the center of a debate around fake news and misinformation on digital platforms. Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg drew criticism last month for declining to remove the InfoWars page. Music streaming service Spotify removed InfoWars podcasts last week, and Apple and Facebook each cited violations of company policies regarding hate speech in banning Jones on Monday. Jones confirmed on Twitter that he had been banned by Facebook, Apple and Spotify. "What conservative news outlet will be next?" he tweeted.<doc-sep>Update: This article originally stated that Facebook had not banned most Alex Jones content from the site, which was true when we scheduled the post on Friday afternoon. But on Monday morning, shortly before this article published, Facebook removed four key Alex Jones pages, effectively banning him from the platform. I've updated the story to reflect this change. Facebook and YouTube both have strict rules against posting content that is hateful, pornographic, or violates someone's privacy. But what if someone posts content that is just egregiously false? Right now, neither Facebook nor YouTube has rules banning this kind of content. And critics say that's a problem. In recent weeks, the issue has come to a head over online provocateur, pundit, and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Jones gleefully flouts the rules of journalistic ethics, regularly making outrageous claims without a shred of evidence. “When I think about all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped, I have zero fear standing up against her,” Jones said in one YouTube video. Last month, Facebook and YouTube both removed a few of Jones' videos, including that one quoted above, citing rules against harassment, bullying, child endangerment, or hate speech. At the end of July, Facebook suspended Jones' account for 30 days, while YouTube recently took down four videos. Then on Monday morning, Facebook banned four of the main pages Alex Jones uses to post content, effectively banning Jones from the platform. But notably, Facebook banned the pages for violating rules against violence and hate speech—not fake news. Facebook continues to insist that fake news, by itself, is not a basis for removing content from the platform. Advertisement "We don't remove false news from Facebook, but instead significantly reduce its distribution by showing it lower in the News Feed," Facebook says in its content guidelines. For some perspective, I talked to two experts who have thought a lot about the problem of fake news online. And neither one of them was able to offer a compelling alternative to Facebook's current approach. "All of these social media platforms will make all these speeches and press releases that they're really committed to ending disinformation on their platform, but they're not really," said Alice Marwick, a communications professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. "If they are committed to disinformation, they do have to kick Alex Jones." Yet she wasn't entirely comfortable with that approach. "Do they want to be the arbitrators of truth?" she asked. "We probably don't want that." Booting someone like Jones from Facebook or YouTube altogether could easily turn him into a martyr among his paranoid fans. And policing content for factual accuracy could suck platforms into endless controversies over hot-button political issues. So as unsatisfying as Facebook's approach is, it might be the best of some bad options. "I think that using algorithms to personalize and filter, as much as it's gotten a bad rap, is probably healthier than saying this thing is available or not available," argued James Grimmelmann, a law professor at Cornell University. Alex Jones, troll and conspiracy theorist Facebook and YouTube have helped Jones amass a huge online audience for his website Infowars. Jones has 2.4 million YouTube subscribers and 1.6 million followers on Facebook. He has built that audience by constantly peddling nonsense. In one rant, Jones claimed that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are literal demons. "Obama and Hillary both smell like sulfur," as Jones put it in the final weeks of the 2016 election. Advertisement Also in 2016, Jones repeatedly touted "Pizzagate," a conspiracy theory that involved prominent Democrats running a child sex ring from the basement of a Washington, DC, pizzeria (as it turned out, the restaurant doesn't even have a basement). Pizzagate rumors online prompted one Alex Jones fan to drive to Washington, DC, and stage an armed confrontation. Jones has promoted outrageous conspiracy theories unrelated to Democratic politicians, too. He has claimed that a number of recent mass shootings, including the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, were false-flag operations organized by the government. That claim got Jones sued by some Sandy Hook parents. Jones claims that the government "can create and steer groups of tornadoes" to use as weapons. He predicted that Lady Gaga would perform a satanic ritual in the 2017 Super Bowl halftime show. So when Facebook executives met with a group of journalists last month to tout the platform's battle against fake news, Jones' name came up, according to CNN: When asked by this reporter how the company could claim it was serious about tackling the problem of misinformation online while simultaneously allowing InfoWars to maintain a page with nearly one million followers on its website, [Facebook's] Hegeman said that the company does not "take down false news." Other media outlets quickly piled on, pressuring Facebook to cut ties with Jones. YouTube faced pressure over hosting Jones as well. Soon afterward, both platforms blocked some of the most egregious videos from Jones' site—videos the platforms said violated pre-existing rules not directly related to fake news. All the while, Facebook stuck to its guns when it came to the question of becoming the fake news police. "We see pages on both the left and the right pumping out what they consider opinion or analysis—but others call fake news," the company tweeted. "We believe banning these pages would be contrary to the basic principles of free speech."<doc-sep>
Facebook, Google and Apple have each taken steps to remove conspiracy theorist Alex Jones from their platforms, marking a significant shift in the approach taken by big tech companies to the radio host. Facebook on Monday announced that it had unpublished four pages belonging to Alex Jones for repeatedly violating the company's standards with inflammatory posts about transgender people, Muslims and immigrants, among other infractions. Facebook said in a blog post that pages belonging to Jones have continued to post content that went against its community standards. Facebook unpublished the Alex Jones Channel Page, the Alex Jones Page, the Infowars Page and the Infowars Nightly News Page. Jones and Infowars had a combined total of more than 2.5 million followers on Facebook across their pages. "Upon review, we have taken it down for glorifying violence, which violates our graphic violence policy, and using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants, which violates our hate speech policies," the statement said in part. YouTube, the other platform on which Jones had a sizable following, followed suit on Monday, terminating Jones' main account, which had 2.4 million subscribers. "All users agree to comply with our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines when they sign up to use YouTube," a YouTube spokesperson said in an email. "When users violate these policies repeatedly, like our policies against hate speech and harassment or our terms prohibiting circumvention of our enforcement measures, we terminate their accounts." Earlier, Apple and Spotify both removed Jones' podcasts from their respective platforms. Infowars' apps are still available for download in Apple's App Store. Jones confirmed on Twitter that he had been banned by Facebook, Apple and Spotify. "What conservative news outlet will be next?" he tweeted. Twitter remains one of the last major platforms to take action against Jones. A spokesperson for Twitter said Infowars is not in violation of Twitter and Periscope rules and noted that replies to Jones are often filled with people rebutting what he is saying in real-time. Infowars did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Paul Joseph Watson, an editor-at-large for Infowars, said on Twitter that Facebook's move was "political censorship" and "a culture war." Facebook and other tech giants have been under growing pressure to crack down on the spread of misinformation across their platforms. Facebook in particular chose to give a boost to mainstream publishers and take action against some people and pages that repeatedly violated its rules. At the same time, Facebook has been criticized by conservatives for what they perceive as a liberal bias against conservative outlets. Infowars emerged as a flashpoint in the debate with some journalists and activists pushing for Facebook to take action. Facebook resisted, with John Hegeman, the head of Facebook’s News Feed, telling journalists in early July that the company would be leaving Infowars to its own devices, according to New York Magazine. Jones has the ability to appeal Facebook's decision, according to the blog post. However, if Jones doesn't appeal or his appeal fails, his page will be permanently removed from the site. Jones had been warned that repeated violations of Facebook's community standards would result in having his pages unpublished. Last week, Facebook removed four videos on four of Jones' pages for violating its hate speech and bullying policies, according to a statement put out by the media platform. It also banned Jones' profile from posting to the social network for 30 days. Facebook uses a "strike" system to determine if a page should be removed from its site altogether, according to the statement. It said when a page "surpasses a certain threshold of strikes, the whole Page is unpublished." Facebook does not disclose how many strikes will result in a page being unpublished. The move by Facebook is the latest crackdown on Jones, who has recently had content removed from other platforms. Last week, YouTube removed four videos posted by Jones and issued a warning that more violations could result in a ban from the video platform. Jones is known for falsely claiming the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School was staged by actors. Those claims have resulted in harassment directed at Sandy Hook families and supporters. Families of Sandy Hook victims have filed lawsuits against Jones for defamation. Spotify had also recently come under pressure for hosting Jones' podcasts.