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Facebook pulls down 22 pages tied to InfoWars' Alex Jones

The removed pages are connected to ones Facebook removed in August.

Queenie Wong Former Senior Writer
Queenie Wong was a senior writer for CNET News, focusing on social media companies including Facebook's parent company Meta, Twitter and TikTok. Before joining CNET, she worked for The Mercury News in San Jose and the Statesman Journal in Salem, Oregon. A native of Southern California, she took her first journalism class in middle school.
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Queenie Wong
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InfoWars founder Alex Jones.

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Facebook's crackdown against far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones isn't over. 

On Tuesday, the social media giant said it removed 22 pages linked to Jones, who founded the conspiracy site InfoWars. The move comes after Facebook pulled down four of Jones' pages in August for violating the social media site's rules against glorifying violence, hate speech and bullying. 

Facebook said it banned more of Jones' pages because of a change it made to its "recidivism policy" in January. That policy initially barred Facebook users from creating new pages that looked similar to ones removed for violating its rules. The company updated the policy and it now applies to existing pages.

The 22 pages that Facebook pulled down, which are based in the US and Brazil, are tied to the ones it removed in August.

"In this first group of Pages we've removed, we've focused on whether Pages we previously removed that had a lot of followers had begun to use other Pages to continue the same activity," a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. "The Pages we removed today are the first group we identified to violate this policy."

Facebook and other tech companies, including Google and Twitter, are under more pressure to do more to crack down on hate speech and fake news. But the companies have also faced allegations that its suppressing conservative speech, which they have denied. Apple, Spotify, YouTube and Twitter have also cracked down on Jones. 

Jones has come under fire for spreading conspiracy theories about the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. Jones' Facebook profile is also still up.

Facebook noted that the August page take-down wasn't due to spreading fake news or hoaxes.

Jones didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. 

CNET's Ian Sherr contributed to this report. 

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