If Alex Jones’ Infowars YouTube channel gets one more strike within the next three months, it will be banned from the site, where it has 2.2 million subscribers.
Infowars—a far-right media outlet that often suggests mass shootings like those at Sandy Hook and Marjory Stoneman Douglas are orchestrated, staged events—claims it got its second strike from YouTube on Tuesday morning, for a video about the Parkland mass shooting, the Hill reports.
According to YouTube’s community guidelines, if an account gets two strikes for violating the rules, no new videos can be posted from the account for two weeks. If the Alex Jones Channel gets another strike, the channel will be killed off.
The Hill campaign editor Will Sommer shared the alert on Twitter:
The Alex Jones channel got its first strike on February 23rd for a video that suggested that David Hogg and other student survivors of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, were crisis actors. The video, titled “David Hogg Can’t Remember His Lines In TV Interview,” was removed for violating the YouTube policies on bullying and harassment.
Curiously, Jones announced his YouTube account had been frozen through a YouTube video about how his account has been frozen, and a follow-up video—“David Hogg Challenges Alex Jones To A Debate”— so it seems the freeze has not yet gone into effect. The video claiming Hogg had challenged Jones to a debate references a tweet from Hogg in which he said, “I’d love to come on and clear some of this up because clearly as a shit journalist you can’t clearly.”
Jones seems to have responded to today’s alert by desperately tweeting Hogg and imploring him multiple times to come on the show to “set the record straight” and clear things up between them.
Hogg responded in a tweet referencing Jones: “I will not speak to anyone that has had disgusting remarks to victims of mass shootings in the past. I sent that tweet without realizing just how awful so many people have been to victims and witnesses of these events in the past.”
[The Hill]