The website Vimeo has pulled content from Infowars and its founder Alex Jones from its site for violating the platform’s video content standards. A spokesperson for the video hosting service told Business Insider on Sunday that the Infowars videos “violated our Terms of Service prohibitions on discriminatory and hateful content.” Vimeo is a video-sharing website in which users can upload, share and view videos.
The Infowars videos had been uploaded to Vimeo on Thursday and Friday. The Vimeo spokesperson also said that the company had informed Jones of the videos’ removal, and had issued a refund, saying “we do not want to profit from content of this nature in any way.”
The video site reported that Infowars had fewer than a dozen videos on the platform as of Wednesday evening, but then an additional 50 videos were posted to the site during the next two days. In the videos that were removed, Jones denounces Muslim immigrants to Europe and the creators of a transgender cartoon.
Vimeo said that within 48 hours of the videos being posted they reached a decision that their content was in violation of the company’s trust and safety standards.
Business Insider reported that Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud will hold a discussion about the removal of the Infowars content during a town hall meeting with company employees in New York City today.
The presence of Infowars content on their platform had become a very controversial topic internally at Vimeo. Many employees were reportedly unhappy that Jones and Infowars were allowed to remain on their website, and had expressed their displeasure with the company’s handling of the issue in online discussion groups.
Vimeo is the latest online social media platform to pull content posted by Infowars or Jones. Facebook, YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts have all recently banned and removed content from the controversial conspiracy theorist.
Twitter, however, has not removed content posted by either Jones or InfoWars from its platform. A Twitter spokesperson said that Infowars and Jones will be permitted to stay on the site for now because so far they have not violated any of its policies or guidelines. A CNN report, however, claimed that Jones had repeatedly violated its policies and called upon Twitter to also institute a ban against the inflammatory content for which Jones is known.
Jones has amassed a massive audience for his conspiracy theories since he founded Infowars in 1999. On the other hand he has also faced massive criticism for spreading his conspiracy theories which are never based in fact. Some of his most extreme theories include the suggestion that the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington were staged by the government.
He was sued by the parents of two children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting for making claims that the shooting was a hoax. They accuse him and Infowars of engaging in a campaign of “false, cruel, and dangerous assertions.” Jones has denied making the statements.
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