May 4, 2019

Infowars Got Banned by Facebook, So Trump Just Gave It a Huge Boost

The president sides with far-right conspiracy theorists.

Alex Jones

Infowars founder Alex Jones was banned from Facebook and Instagram this week.Jose Luis Magana/AP

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President Donald Trump wants you to know just what he thinks about Facebook’s decision to ban extremist media figures from its platforms.

On Thursday, the social media giant announced that it would no longer permit content from Infowars—which for years has propagated conspiracy theories on topics ranging from 9/11 to the Sandy Hook massacre—to be shared on Facebook or Instagram, which Facebook owns. Facebook also announced that it was banning accounts run by Infowars founder Alex Jones; Paul Joseph Watson, Infowars’ former editor at large; and others Facebook views as “dangerous actors.” Watson has a long history of promoting falsehoods and conspiracy theories and posting hate-filled videos with titles like “Why Are Feminists Fat & Ugly?”

Trump, who has long insisted—without evidence—that social media companies are biased against conservatives, wasn’t happy about Facebook’s actions. On Friday, he branded Watson a “conservative thinker” and tweeted that he was “surprised” to see him banned from Facebook. Then on Saturday, Trump retweeted two of Watson’s tweets.

Trump then followed that up by sharing an Infowars video featuring black Trump supporters singing the president’s praises.

This isn’t the first time Trump has supported Infowars. During the 2016 presidential election, he called in to Jones’ radio show and gave a 30-minute interview. “Your reputation is amazing,” Trump told Jones. After the election, Trump called Jones to thank him for his support, according to Jones, who recounted the conversation in a video he later released on Infowars.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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