Facebook is cracking down on more content from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. On Tuesday, the company deleted 22 pages connected to him and his Infowars show.
The crackdown addresses a loophole in the company's policies. The official Facebook pages for Jones and Infowars were deleted back in August over promoting hate speech. But it wasn't long before other Facebook pages appeared hosting Jones' content. One of them included NewsWars, which managed to gain over 30,000 likes and was actually created back in Dec. 2016.
Why Facebook didn't take action sooner was due to the company's "recidivism policy," which was intended to only stop offenders like Jones and his associates from creating new pages on Facebook — not from managing existing ones to push their content.
To close the gap, the company last month updated the policy. Now the social network can crack down on offenders who use old Facebook pages to continue the same activity.
"We use a broad set of signals to determine if a page violates our recidivism policy," a company spokesperson told PCMag. In this case, Facebook said the 22 pages had similar titles to the Infowars and Alex Jones pages the company suspended back in August. The 22 pages also involved the same administrators.
In response to the crackdown, Infowars on Tuesday accused Facebook of suppressing free speech. The site also claims the affected Facebook pages were fan-made.
However, Jones's personal profile still remains up on Facebook. "When we enforce our recidivism policy against pages, the admins can still maintain their profiles on Facebook but are no longer able to create and use a page akin to one we've removed," the social network said.
Despite the crackdown, you can still find other Facebook pages hosting Infowars content by simply conducting a search. Facebook's spokesperson explained: "Should other people choose to share video from Infowars that do not violate our Community Standards, we don't remove them."
The company specifically took down Jones' Facebook pages over promoting hate speech, not for publicizing hoaxes or fake news. However, the company spokesperson also noted that Tuesday's crackdown was merely a first step in enforcing the updated recidivism policy. On the same day, the social network also unpublished a number of pages that were based in Brazil for violating the policy.
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