Alex Jones is trying to find a new home for his crumbling Infowars empire, but his latest encampment lasted mere days before he was banned from yet another digital platform. Late last week, Jones posted several videos on Vimeo, but by Sunday he and his videos had been removed from the service.
Vimeo told Business Insider that it removed the videos because they “violated our Terms of Service prohibitions on discriminatory and hateful content.” The spokesperson added, “[W]e do not want to profit from content of this nature in any way.” Employees inside the company had reportedly voiced concern about the account’s existence last week. Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud plans to address the decision during a town hall meeting Monday morning.
Vimeo’s ban follows decisions by Facebook, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube to ban or at least suspend Jones from using their services to spread his conspiracy theories and hateful rhetoric.
One service that continues to allow Jones full access, however, is Twitter. Company CEO Jack Dorsey enraged many last week when he seemed to suggest that Twitter bore no responsibility for filtering the content posted on its platform, adding that journalists should suffer the burden of countering his lies and bigotry. After CNN uncovered numerous tweets from Jones that clearly violated Twitter’s rules, the company acknowledged the violations yet still gave Jones a pass, indicating that the remaining tweets were from before the platform had updated its community guidelines.
Jones is perhaps best known for suggesting the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, and that several grieving parents were crisis actors. In an attempt to rebut this portrayal — and provide some cover from a defamation lawsuit filed against him by several families of Sandy Hook victims — Jones posted an hour-long “respectful message for Sandy Hook parents” this weekend, in which he largely defended his skepticism about what happened and complained about how he’s been silenced. “Now Sandy Hook is an anti-First Amendment engine,” he said. “Isn’t it funny how that works?”
On Sunday, Infowars also ran a piece defending Jones and claiming that the CIA helped create Google and Facebook “to make it easier to spy on people.”