Alex Jones, InfoWars losing ads, sponsors and free speech concerns rise, Tim Pool details situation
As YouTube continues to crack down on content they claim violates its terms of usage and promotes offensive and/or misleading content. Alex Jones and InfoWars has become their main target to be banned.
Jones announced that YouTube would be freezing and deleting his YouTube channel, Sunday — but the claim was false. They are “one strike away” from being banned.
Public domain image/Piotr VaGla Waglowski, http://www.vagla.pl
“The Alex Jones channel with billions of views is frozen,” Jones wrote on Twitter. “We have been told it will be deleted tomorrow and all 33 thousands [sic] videos will be erased.”
CNN reports that numerous companies, including Nike, Moen, Expedia, Acer, ClassPass, Honey, Alibaba, and OneFamily, have pulled their ads after learning that their ads were running on Jones’ channel.
Jones made headlines for saying that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut was a hoax, and more recently, suggesting without proof that some of the survivors of the recent shooting at the Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida were “crisis actors.”
Journalist Tim Pool takes issues with YouTube’s decision, not defending Jones, but explaining how his videos highlighting lies in the press, “ahead of the mainstream” have been removed (and/or flagged).
YouTube has flagged videos of Pool refuting errors in reporting (he gives an example of one AP corrected a day or so later).
Pool has done other videos on the YouTube “purge” and asks in the clip below “When you take down InfoWars, who is to stop YouTube from taking down another story if it might turn out to be true?”
Pool uses the David Hogg controversy, the theories and Hogg’s public persona to illustrate how YouTube uses the hammer of censorship picking out harassment claims, attacks with alt-right labels to take out “offensive videos.”
Pool asks if refuting a story or pushing back against a story is only valid on side of the political aisle, but what is YouTube finds that harassment and removing certain content is a slippery slope to dangerous bias.
Check out Tim Pool’s channel HERE
Stay strong America, the Land where you have the freedom to be offended.
