The Big Tech war against Alex Jones and Infowars continued on Friday as the coordinated overtly political effort to silence one of the country’s strongest pro-POTUS Trump voices continued.
As Infowars’ Paul Joseph Watson reported, PayPal became the latest Big Tech firm to deplatform Jones and his websites and company in a bid to “financially sabotage an influential media outlet just weeks before the mid-term elections.”
Watson said that PayPal officials telephoned Infowars just a day earlier confirming they would be de-platforming Jones and terminating his agreement with the company following what they claimed was a “comprehensive review of the Infowars site.”
As other Big Tech firms have done, PayPal claims that Infowars violated the company’s “acceptable use policy” for allegedly promoting “hate and discriminatory practices against certain communities and religions.”
Also, as before with other platforms, no specific or concrete examples of policy violations were given to Infowars by PayPal; the company just wanted to drop Infowars and Jones, so it did.
Rather, Watson said, the all-encompassing label of “hate” – “so vague that virtually anything could qualify – was used again to justify the deplatforming decision.
He noted further:
Off record, Infowars was told that criticism of Islam and opposition to transgenderism being taught to children in schools were two of the examples of “hate”.
The ban was instituted despite InfowarsStore.com containing no political content whatsoever, emphasizing how the decision was a broader attack on the Infowars platform.
The company gave Infowars just 10 days to find another online payment processor before “all services” would be terminated.
Not coincidentally, PayPal’s decision followed a call to deplatform Jones and Infowars published by the George Soros-funded group Right Wing Watch, which claimed that the news and information site had engaged in “egregious violations of the platform’s own terms of service.”
Notes Watson, “Right Wing Watch routinely violates copyright by uploading entire sections of other people’s videos to YouTube without any pretense of fair use, yet the group’s channel has not been deleted.”
Was a crime committed?
Others got in on trying to get Jones’ Infowars deplatformed by PayPal. For some reason The Washington Post, whose claim that “Democracy Dies in Darkness” has turned into a sick joke given the paper’s personal war against Jones and his news channels, also published a story headlined, “As Alex Jones rails against ‘Big Tech,’ his Infowars stores still thrive online.” If that wasn’t a dog whistle warning to PayPal, then nothing is.
Even elected Democrats have piled on the ‘censor Infowars and Alex Jones’ bandwagon – after hypocritically swearing allegiance to uphold and defend the Constitution (which begins with the First Amendment’s protections including freedom of speech and the press). They include Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia and U.S. Rep. Ted Deutch of Florida.
Watson, as have others, argues that PayPal’s decision, and those of other tech platforms, to ban or censor Jones and Infowars could be legally injurious and thus illegal.
“PayPal is akin to the public square of transactional commerce,” he wrote. “It could be argued that their decision represents tortious interference, interference in interstate commerce and racketeering,” he wrote.
In fact, the president of the United States is concerned about it as well. As NewsTarget reported Sunday, the White House is preparing an executive order Trump will sign once it’s been vetted through legal channels and various federal agencies that “would require federal antitrust and other law enforcement agencies to begin investigating the content management practices of Facebook, Google, YouTube, and other social media behemoths.”
The order, Bloomberg Quint noted further, instructs federal antitrust authorities and agencies to “thoroughly investigate whether any online platform has acted in violation of antitrust laws.”
The order calls for other actions as well, but overall it represents a shift in POTUS Trump’s attitude regarding social media censorship and other actions from merely criticizing them to punishing them legally if they are found to be in violation of various laws.
As this latest arbitrary action against Infowars demonstrates, this executive action is overdue.
Read more about the White House’s attempt to combat online censorship at WhiteHouse.news.
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