Alex Jones’ Content Removed From Vimeo
Far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ content has been removed from Vimeo, The Hill reports.
All Infowars content has been removed from the video platform for “violating prohibitions on discriminatory and hateful content.”
This makes Vimeo — a video uploading and sharing service similar to YouTube — the latest platform to remove Infowars content. The videos, posted to the service on Thursday and Friday, violated the platform’s rules.
A spokesperson for the company told the Business Insider that Vimeo does “not want to profit from content of this nature in any way.”
According to the BI, Alex Jones has become somewhat of a hot topic internally, at the video sharing platform’s headquarters, with several employees upset that the conspiracy theorist’s content was allowed to stay on company servers.
Infowars had less than a dozen videos uploaded on the platform up until Wednesday, but more than 50 were posted to the site in the following days.
The removal will be announced by Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud at a Town Hall meeting scheduled for 9 a.m. Monday, August 13.
As the Inquisitr reported, Infowars host Alex Jones was banned by Facebook, Apple, YouTube, and Spotify earlier this week.
Jones was banned for promoting violence and hate speech. Most of his content is still available on Twitter, however, but Jones’ Twitter days may have been numbered too, considering the social network had started removing his content, following a CNN report.
Vimeo pulls Infowars content for violating standards on "discriminatory and hateful content" https://t.co/TAFci2sO8x pic.twitter.com/ytoAWrK1pk
— The Hill (@thehill) August 13, 2018
CNN pointed out that Twitter’s vice president for trust and safety, Del Harvey, said that the social network would have taken action against Jones had he violated the rules, and then went on to cite examples of Alex Jones’ content posted to the Infowars official Twitter account, or the host’s personal account, which violate a slew of Twitter’s internal policies. Less than an hour after the CNN story went live, more than a dozen videos and tweets from Jones-affiliated Twitter accounts were removed.
The saga of Alex Jones and Infowars seems to have sparked a debate about the limits of free speech, about the fine line between free speech and calls for violence, and about digital monopolies.
The Huffington Post argued that the bigger issue in the case of Alex Jones are digital platform monopolies. These monopolies, the Huffington Post suggested, need to be broken up and regulated.
“Breaking up the social media giants wouldn’t keep Jones from wanting access to a monopoly platform, but it might keep future lunatics at bay without limiting speech or turning the internet into a spam-filled nightmare of raving lunacy,” writer Paul Blumenthal concluded.
