It appears the image-collecting website your mom uses to find recipes and crafts no longer welcomes the conspiracy spewing host of InfoWars, Alex Jones.
After Apple removed five of Jones’ six podcast streams from its website, and Facebook removed four pages controlled by Jones, and Googled removed Jones’ channel, the man who claimed the Sandy Hook shooting was a “false flag” has been removed from Pinterest and Spotify.
Links to Pinterest and Spotify pages appeared on InfoWars’ homepage, but after media company Mashable reached out to the image board website for comment, the link went dead. The Spotify link is also dead, and the music streaming service told The Guardian it had removed all episodes of The Alex Jones Show.
“Clicking through, which you can no longer do but we wouldn’t have recommended anyway, showed a collection of the same garbage that got InfoWars kicked off other major tech platforms,” wrote Mashable’s Jack Morse. “There were links to sketchy supplements (‘From the food and water that you drink to the air that you breathe.. there is information out there to help guide your health back to the highway of freedom’), more Sandy Hook disinformation (‘EXPOSED: MEDIA CAUGHT IN HUGE SANDY HOOK TRIAL LIE…’), and rants about Hollywood and pedophilia.”
Morse had reached out to Pinterest while writing its story on Jones’ removal from other platforms. The company didn’t respond by press time, but then Jones’ page “mysteriously went offline.” On Monday afternoon, the company responded to Morse and acknowledged that it had removed Jones’ page.
“Consistent with our existing policies, we take action against accounts that repeatedly save content that could lead to harm,” Pinterest told Morse. “People come to Pinterest to discover ideas for their lives, and we continue to enforce our principles to maintain a safe, useful and inspiring experience for our users.”
In its statement to The Guardian, Spotify said Jones’ removal was due to policy violations.
“We take reports of hate content seriously and review any podcast episode or song that is flagged by our community,” a Spotify spokesperson told The Guardian. “Due to repeated violations of Spotify’s prohibited content policies, The Alex Jones Show has lost access to the Spotify platform.”
The Guardian reports that three other InfoWars podcasts are still available on Spotify.
When The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro reported on Jones’ removal from Apple, Facebook, and Google earlier today, he called the coordinated effort “dead wrong”:
First, the caveats: these are all private companies, and their termination of Jones’ accounts isn’t a legal violation of the First Amendment.
But it is a problem. It’s a problem because these policies are extraordinarily vague. These policies aren’t merely designed to crack down on speech openly advocating or threatening violence, or containing obscenity. These policies are deliberately unclear as well as political.