Will Sommer, Daily Beast, August 6, 2018

YouTube banned the main Infowars account from its site on Monday, robbing founder Alex Jones of his largest platform to spew hate speech.

Around noon, YouTube revoked TheAlexJones channel, writing: “This account has been terminated for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines.” Specifically, YouTube’s terms of service prohibit hate speech and Jones has been spewing invective for years. He falsely claimed parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting were “crisis actors.” Then he promoted the Pizzagate conspiracy theory alleging there was a child-sex slave ring run by Democrats under a Washington, D.C. pizza shop. Earlier this year, Infowars blamed the Parkland shooting on the wrong person in an attempt to suggest the attack was perpetrated by a “communist.” Last week, Jones mimed shooting special counsel Robert Mueller.

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Jones reacted to the YouTube ban with a broadcast from Periscope, the livestreaming platform owned by Twitter. Jones claimed that he was the victim of a “globalist death star” intent on banning conservatives from social media.

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Jones claimed that he had expected the ban and had prepared for it. He urged his followers to react to the ban by buying more of his InfoWars dietary supplements, imploring them to “feed your gladiator.”

Twitter, the only remaining major social media platform that hasn’t banned Jones and InfoWars from their main accounts, said the accounts do not currently violate its rules.

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Other Infowars-related accounts appeared to be unaffected by the ban. Watson has another 1.3 million YouTube subscribers, while other Infowars accounts have a combined 423,000 subscribers.

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Sleeping Giants, a liberal campaign aimed at pressuring advertisers, pressed YouTube on Monday to ban Jones in the wake of the Facebook and Apple bans. The group claimed that YouTube has been “doing backflips” to avoid banning Infowars, citing the idiosyncratic application of the “three strikes” policy.

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