With the mid-term elections rapidly approaching, YouTube has become the latest internet platform to restrict the activities of far-right conspiracy website InfoWars.
The company has pulled four InfoWars videos for including hate speech and graphic content, and has banned it from broadcasting live for 90 days.
The move represents the 'third strike' for InfoWars, which received its first in February for 'harassment and bullying', after posting videos claiming that the Parkland shooting survivors were crisis actors - a claim that would be laughable were it not also so callous. The site's second strike followed a few days later and involved similar claims.
However, because 90 days has elapsed since InfoWars' first and second strikes, they are deemed to have elapsed and the site isn't facing a YouTube ban altogether as a result of this third strike.
Founder Alex Jones is chipper about the ban - as well he might be, seeing as three of the videos are still available on Facebook and the InfoWars site itself. On Twitter, he describes the videos as 'critical of liberalism'.
In one, titled How To Prevent Liberalism – A Public Service Announcement, a man pushes a child to the ground; in another, Jones rails against a kids' cartoon that shows boys dressed as glamorous women. The third apparently shows how 'Islam Has Already Conquered Europe - news to those of us that live here, but, hey.
The fourth, which for some reason has been removed from InfoWars' Facebook page, is titled French President Macron Pretends Crime Rates And Migrants Are Not Co-Related.
Facebook, meanwhile, has declared itself happy enough with InfoWars - it reckons that Jones's claim that special counsel and former FBI director Robert Mueller is a child rapist and his pantomimed shooting of Mueller doesn't violate its community guidelines.
The company says that the 'shooting doesn't count as a credible threat of violence, and told reporters that 'just being false doesn’t violate the community standards'.
As for Twitter, it seems to be taking a more subtle approach. According to Gizmodo, which did a little experimenting, Twitter appears to be downgrading the reach of posts by InfoWars editor-at-large Paul Joseph Watson, but not of those from Jones and InfoWars itself.
All this raises the question of what happens to the social media presence of InfoWars and other similar sites as the November mid-term election approaches. Facebook has made it pretty clear that it's happy to host the site's posts; last week, it said it would remove misinformation only if it incites violence, and initially only in Sri Lanka and Myanmar.
Twitter, meanwhile, seems set to continue its policy of shadowbanning only the more marginal far-right trolls.
As for YouTube, its three-strike rule might seem straightforward - but in this case at least, it's actually anything but. InfoWars' second strike, for example, comprised two separate Parkland shooting conspiracy videos posted several days apart. Even more notably, the four videos covered by the latest strike span an astonishing three-month period.
All this means that YouTube's 90-day ban on live videos by InfoWars may actually be less arbitrary than it seems. If YouTube had counted the Parkland shooting videos as two strikes, or the four recent videos as three strikes (two of them were posted on the same day), then InfoWars could easily be facing a permanent ban.
As things stand, YouTube's 90-day ban on live streams from InfoWars will of course come to an end towards the end of October - just a couple of weeks before the critical date.
If InfoWars keeps its nose clean between now and then, it could well be up and running as normal - and with YouTube collecting as usual from the ads.
Update: The original version of this story named Alex Jones as the man pushing a child to the ground in the banned video clip. In fact, Jones merely comments enthusiastically.
