YouTube banned the main Infowars account from its site on Monday, robbing founder Alex Jones of his largest platform to spew hate speech.
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YouTube told CNBC that Jones had broken the site’s rules about hate speech and harassment.
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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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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.
In recent weeks, Facebook, Apple, and Spotify had banned Infowars, but YouTube had seemed reluctant to impose the death penalty. Instead, it reprimanded Jones. In July, for example, YouTube struck four Infowars videos from the site—theoretically, more than the three “strikes” required under YouTube policy to justify a ban. But YouTube opted to bundle the four strikes together, meaning that Jones’ channel instead only received one strike.
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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