Alex Jones Incited the Capitol Riot on Facebook Even Though He Was Banned 2 Years Ago

[Generic Other]

Facebook banned Infowars in 2018 and Alex Jones in 2019.

So how did articles and videos from Alex Jones and Infowars urging followers to “prepare for war” received over 1M interactions on Facebook in the 30 days leading up to the Capitol insurrection?

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Alex Jones has been banned from Facebook for almost two years, yet his wild and baseless allegations that helped foment the insurrection at the Capitol were seen by hundreds of thousands of Facebook users in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6.

Research from digital rights group Avaaz published Thursday morning and shared exclusively with VICE News shows that in the 30 days leading up to the riots, content from Jones’ websites, promoting voter fraud claims telling fans to “prepare for war,” amassed over 1.1 million interactions across Facebook.

Jones’ show Infowars was banned by Facebook in 2018, and the conspiracy theorist had his personal account removed in May 2019 along with a slew of far-right extremists and white supremacists, including Milo Yiannopolous, Laura Loomer, and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

Jones attended and played an important role in organizing the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the insurrection. He pledged $50,000 in “seed money” to help organize the rally and on the day, prior to the storming of the Capitol, Jones addressed attendees, repeating lies about voter fraud and a stolen election. He’s currently under investigation by the Justice Department and FBI for his alleged role in the Capitol breach.

Despite the bans in place against him and his website, it wasn’t difficult to find Jones’ content on Facebook.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgqyvg/facebook-helped-alex-jones-share-prepare-for-war-posts-before-the-capitol-riots

[Initech]

1. What's scarier is that he's almost reveling in the fact that he's been banned from social media.

All of his posts say "Come and see "THE BANNED" show!". No, there's a reason you've been banned, jackass.

[RockRaven]

2. Facebook does not lack the technical capacity to successfully ban him, or any other creep...

Their permissiveness is volitional. They nominally ban him for PR reasons, and then decline to effectively ban him to continue to profit from the traffic.

[Scrivener7]

3. This. Facebook is not our friend and it is not benign.

[crickets]

4. 👆 This.