In recent weeks, Infowars — the go-to website for the tinfoil hat brigade — has seen its audience plummet after companies like Apple, Spotify, and Google removed the publication one by one from their platforms.
Before it was removed, more than two million people were subscribed to the network’s YouTube channel, which had amassed billions of views for its conspiratorial videos. Millions more followed the site’s social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter. And as those audiences shriveled, the site’s proprietor Alex Jones increasingly urged his remaining followers to fill the site’s coffers through donations.
That job got harder on Friday when online finance giant PayPal announced it was cutting off Jones and Infowars from its service as well. The site’s online store — which traffics mostly in an assortment of supplements with pseudo-scientific names like “Superblue Fluoride-Free Toothpaste” and “Bio-True Selenium” — relies on PayPal to process transactions. Infowars will have 10 days to find another company to process payments.
PayPal was the focus of an ongoing campaign to pressure companies that do business with Infowars to cut ties with the publication over its continued harassment of the families of the Sandy Hook school shooting victims and dissemination of racist, sexist, and otherwise bigoted content.
“Our values are the foundation for the decision we made this week,” a PayPal spokesperson said in a statement to The Verge. “We undertook an extensive review of the Infowars sites, and found instances that promoted hate or discriminatory intolerance against certain communities and religions, which run counter to our core value of inclusion.”
Naturally, Infowars took the news of PayPal’s decision in stride.
“PayPal banning Infowars is the ultimate culmination of what represents a de facto Communist Chinese-style social credit score, where first you are demonized, then censored, before your basic ability to operate freely in the marketplace is withdrawn,” posited one of Jones’ acolytes via Twitter.
In an article (a screenshot of which can be seen here so you don’t have to click through to their website), one Infowars contributor wrote that PayPal’s decision “represents nothing less than a political ploy designed to financially sabotage an influential media outlet just weeks before the mid-term elections.”
They are correct about the timing of the midterm elections, and perhaps even about being financially sabotaged. But “influential media outlet?” Certainly not anymore.