The left-wing tech war against Alex Jones, the voluble right-wing conspiracy theorist whose Infowars website and broadcasts are among the most popular on the Internet, continued into Friday last week.
Twitter finally banned Jones permanently on Thursday after his verbal confrontations with CNN’s Oliver Darcy and Senator Marco Rubio, blocking Jones from using one of his important social-media outlets.
But on Friday, Apple, Inc., which led the charge against Jones when it dropped his material from its iTunes platform, bringing Facebook and YouTube with it, dumped Jones’ InfoWars Official app.
“Upsetting” Content
Apple, Inc. told the media that it banned Jones because he retails “objectionable content” that trespasses its content rules.
According to Reuters, “Apple said the guidelines Jones violated bar ‘defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content, including references or commentary about religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other targeted groups, particularly if the app is likely to humiliate, intimidate, or place a targeted individual or group in harm’s way.’”
A spokesman for Apple told the New York Times that users cannot peddle material that is “‘offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust or in exceptionally poor taste.’ She declined to say whether any specific content in the app led to its removal.”
Reuters reported that Jones replied, “I was taken down not because we lied but because we tell the truth and because we were popular.”
The question is whether Apple’s move against Jones’ app will hurt him all that much. Google’s Play Store is still moving the app for Android smartphones. As the Times reported, Android software runs 80 percent of the world’s smartphones.
Long-Term War
The tech titans have been waging war against Jones for months, moving against him incrementally, largely at the behest of reporters such as Darcy, who once toiled for radio talker Glenn Beck. Darcy waged something of a one-man war against Jones, hectoring officials of the major social-media platforms at public events.
Apple iTunes, Facebook, and YouTube struck first, banning Jones and his Infowars site. Twitter followed with a seven-day suspension, but then banned him for good last week after he showed up on Capitol Hill to make trouble during the testimony of Facebook chief Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter boss Jack Dorsey. The two tech titans testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee about their plans to combat foreign manipulation of their platforms.
The last straw, apparently, was Jones’ hallway confrontation with Darcy. Jones said Darcy possessed the “eyes of a rat,” and that Darcy was a “thought police” force, “running around, trying to police the Internet and try[ing] to shut people down.”
Before that, he waylaid Rubio outside the hearing room where Sandberg and Dorsey spoke. Jones barged into an impromptu news conference at which Rubio was trying to explain his concerns about foreign manipulation of social media to affect the outcome of American elections.
After repeatedly hectoring Rubio, and interrupting the senator as he tried to speak, Jones patted him on the shoulder.
“Hey, don’t touch me again, man,” Rubio warned. “I’m asking you not to touch me.”
“Oh, you want me to get arrested,” the Infowars proprietor said.
“You’re not going to get arrested,” Rubio warned. “I’ll take care of it myself.”
“Oh, oh, he’ll beat me up,” Jones said.
“I didn’t say that,” Rubio replied.
Speaking to the media as the day began, Jones accused its major institutions of trying to silence him. Asked Jones, “What country have we turned into when the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN lobby to take me off every platform?”
Censoring Conservatives
For some, Apple’s move against Jones offers more evidence that the leftists who run the tech giants will eventually block any conservative challenge to the Deep State and its myrmidons in the major political parties.
President Trump has repeatedly tweeted that Google and social media are censoring conservatives, and Dorsey has admitted Twitter is a leftist organization.
Google, for instance, pink-slipped engineer James Damore, who challenged the company’s leftist “echo chamber” in a long memo. He has sued the globe-straddling tech behemoth for discrimination.”
A group of conservatives who work at Facebook, FBers for Political Diversity, published a similar indictment against their employer. Of course, that complaint “triggered” some other employees who thought the complaint “offensive.”
Related stories:
Twitter Shuts Down Alex Jones, Infowars
Ideological Renegades Roil Facebook
Trump Thumps Google; Kudlow Hints at Regulation
Trump Unloads on Social Media; Censoring Continues
ACLU: Don’t Be So Fast to Ban Jones
Twitter Admits Leaning Left; Denies Censoring Conservatives
Facebook to PragerU: Sorry About That Censorship