By ADAM SPECTOR<\/p>\n
Twitter banned Alex Jones and other accounts pertaining to InfoWars, his fake news website on Thursday afternoon. This was covered by countless local and national news sources including ABC, CBS, NBC, The Wall Street Journal<\/em> and\u00a0The Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0to name a few. This story has also been covered by a number of tech\u00a0websites such as CNET and Engadget.<\/p>\n InfoWars is known for promoting fake news stories and conspiracy theories such as 9-11 being an inside job, the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, and countless untrue stories about various public figures.<\/p>\n \u201cToday, we permanently suspended @realalexjones and @infowars from Twitter and Periscope. We took this action based on new reports of Tweets and videos posted yesterday that violate our abusive behavior policy, in addition to the accounts\u2019 past violations,\u201d the company wrote on its account.<\/p>\n Twitter is not the first high-profile company to drop Infowars. Apple, YouTube, Facebook and Spotify removed InfoWars from their platforms earlier this August. These companies mostly cited \u201chate speech\u201d as their reason for removing Jones and InfoWars from their platforms and not for deliberately spreading false information.<\/p>\n Back in August, Twitter publicly stated that they would not remove Jones or InfoWars because they did not violate their policies. Twitter had previously suspended Jones for one week for promoting violence against news reporters, saying to get their \u201cbattle rifles\u201d ready.<\/p>\n Twitter decided to ban Jones and InfoWars after Jones publicly harassed Oliver Darcy, a reporter at CNN. On this same day, Jones also harassed Senator Marco Rubio.<\/p>\n News sources such as The Wall Street Journal<\/em>,\u00a0The<\/em> Washington Post<\/em> and The<\/em> New York Times<\/em> have done a better job of covering this story than most other news sources because they also mentioned that these tech companies have been criticized for waiting too long to remove InfoWars and other fake news sources from their platforms.<\/p>\n Many believe that some of these companies only removed Jones and Infowars because other companies did so and not for the reasons that they provided. This is a fair and valid point, as sources like InfoWars have already made a major impact on the public. In addition to this, InfoWars has been around for years and has had few problems releasing false information, hateful content, and promoting violence. Many news sources have made the mistake of labeling InfoWars\u00a0as a far-right website and not a fake news website.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By ADAM SPECTOR Twitter banned Alex Jones and other accounts pertaining to InfoWars, his fake news website on Thursday afternoon. This was covered by countless local and national news sources including ABC, CBS, NBC, The Wall Street Journal and\u00a0The Washington … Continue reading