Facebook deletes InfoWars pages

Facebook has removed four pages belonging to the controversial right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones following weeks of pressure from critics and similar moves from other tech platforms.

The pages include one for Jones’s flagship radio show InfoWars as well as his fan page. Facebook said in a blog post Monday morning that the pages were unpublished due to repeated violations of the platform’s content policies, and the move comes after the company took down videos posted by Jones last week.

“Since then, more content from the same Pages has been reported to us — upon review, we have taken it down for glorifying violence, which violates our graphic violence policy, and using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants, which violates our hate speech policies,” Facebook wrote in its blog post.

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The move comes shortly after Apple and Spotify took down Jones’s podcasts.

Paul Joseph Watson, an editor-at-large for InfoWars, accused Facebook of removing the pages for political reasons.

“This is political censorship,” Watson wrote on Twitter. “This is culture war.”

Facebook has been under increasing pressure to ban InfoWars as part of its promised effort to crack down on the spread of misinformation on its platform. The social network had so far refused, and on Monday it said the removals were the result of the pages accumulating too many strikes and had nothing to do with its policy on fake news.

Jones and InfoWars have pushed unfounded theories about the U.S. government being behind the 9/11 attacks and other conspiracies. Jones is also the subject of a number of lawsuits for claiming that the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a hoax.

Facebook said that Jones will have the opportunity to appeal the decision. If he doesn’t, the pages will be banned permanently.

–Updated at 10:21 a.m.