Facebook Should Reject Online Hate
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is so racist, homophobic and xenophobic that Apple, Facebook, Spotify, Twitter and YouTube banned him and his show InfoWars from their sites in 2018. But now he’s returned to Facebook with multiple new pages and the social-media giant has allowed him to resume profiting off lies and hate.
A legacy of hate
Jones is the Pizzagate conspiracy theorist who in 2016 claimed a gay-owned Washington, D.C. pizzeria was host to a child sex ring — inspiring one of his followers to shoot up the place with an AR-15 rifle. Jones is also behind the awful lie that parents who lost their young children in the horrifying Sandy Hook elementary-school shooting are paid actors, subjecting those grieving parents to death threats, harassment and physical confrontations.
When Facebook kicked Jones off last August, it explained that he had violated its hate-speech and bullying policies, and that he had glorified violence and used dehumanizing language to describe transgender people, Muslims and immigrants. Now that Jones is back on the platform he’s doing the exact same thing. We cannot allow Facebook to ignore this.
Alex Jones has made his name by profiting from hate and conspiracy theories that harm people of color, Muslims, LGBTQIA+ people, immigrants and victims of mass violence, among others. If Facebook allows him to remain on its platform the entire community will be less safe, and the platform itself will be guilty of making money off of Jones’ carefully coordinated hate-profiteering machine.
A few months ago Free Press and dozens of partners launched the Change the Terms campaign, pressuring social-media companies like Facebook to adopt model corporate policies that ban hateful activities and racism from their sites, and improve enforcement, due process and accountability. Alex Jones is a perfect example of a hate pundit that violates our model policies and Facebook needs to act now before his hateful lies endanger any more lives.
Enough is enough: Urge Facebook to ban Jones permanently.
