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Alex Jones (C), an American radio host of InfoWars, author and conspiracy theorist.
Facebook removed four videos from the controversial conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and slapped him with a 30-day ban after deeming that he violated its policies on bullying and hate speech.
The social network’s decision comes not long after Google-owned video sharing site YouTube issued a strike against him and also removed four of his videos. The strike meant that Jones would not be able to live stream for 90 days.
“Our community standards make it clear that we prohibit content that encourages physical harm (bullying), or attacks someone based on their religious affiliation or gender identity (hate speech),” a spokesperson for Facebook said in a statement.
“We remove content that violates our standards as soon as we’re aware of it. In this case, we received reports related to four different videos on the pages that Infowars and Alex Jones maintain on Facebook. We reviewed the content against our community standards and determined that it violates. All four videos have been removed from Facebook.”
Jones violated Facebook’s content guidelines multiple times, resulting in him being banned from the site for 30 days.
Facebook has come under heightened pressure over how it handles fake news and other forms of misinformation as of late.
The company’s market value on Thursday took a huge nosedive on concerns that its revenues would be further impacted by the scandal surrounding the sharing of personal data with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica. In fact, Facebook is the first company in history to have lost more than $100 billion in market value in just one day.
The removal of Jones’ videos by Facebook and YouTube signifies yet another example of how social media firms and other content platforms are continually grappling with the phenomenon of fake news.
Many fear that the prevalence of misinformation online and the way people are targeted by it has played a role in multiple elections, not least the U.K. vote to leave the European Union and the U.S. presidential election in 2016.
