February 5, 2019

Facebook Finally Removes Another 22 Alex Jones Accounts

But the company says the conspiracy theorist’s personal page can stay up.

Jeff Malet/Newscom via ZUMA Press

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Facebook on Tuesday took down another 22 pages associated with Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist and Infowars founder.

The removals come after outlets including Mother Jones, along with the Daily Beast, The Next Web and Daily Dot, reported on how Jones and his content remained on the site, despite an August ban targeting his accounts. Mother Jones previously detailed how Facebook left accounts that routinely posted livestreams of Alex Jones’s daily Infowars show to thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of followers, allowing Jones to effectively remain on the platform, despite its high profile move to ban him in August.

Facebook had also allowed what appeared to be an official page for Infowars’s store to remain live, allowing Jones to continue to make money on the platform that had ostensibly banned him. 

The social media behemoth deleted these and other pages on Tuesday as a part of what it said was an update to its “recidivism policy” in an effort “to better stop or prevent people who have had Pages removed for violating our Community Standards from using other Pages to continue the same activity.”

The company had initially announced the update, which went into effect today, on January 23. Under the previous rules, users who preemptively created backup accounts before their main account was banned would be allowed to stay on the platform and create new related pages.

People, predictably, had taken advantage of this loophole. “We updated this policy because we saw people working to get around our previous recidivism policy by using existing Pages that they already manage for the same purpose as the Page we had removed for violating our Community Standards,” a Facebook spokesperson said in an emailed statement. 

Jones had initially been banned after pushing conspiracy theories, including ones that incited harassment against the survivors of shootings in Parkland, Florida. and at Sandy Hook Elementary school. Several family members of victims who died in the shooting at Sandy Hook elementary are suing Jones for defamation, including at least one family that’s been forced into hiding. 

Facebook said that despite the new actions, it is not removing Jones’s personal Facebook profile, which is still on its site.

 

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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