Alex Jones banned from Facebook? His videos are still there — and so are his followers

Infowars is gone from Facebook after a high-profile showdown over the summer between Silicon Valley and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. But another Facebook page he controls, NewsWars, has taken its place — and Jones’s many fans have followed. In the three months since Facebook removed four of Jones’s pages over allegations of hate speech, his NewsWars page has remained intact and surged in posts and page views. Videos hosted by the NewsWars Facebook page have totaled 3.9 million views since Aug, nearly reaching the monthly viewership of Jones’s videos on Infowars and other pages he controlled before they were shut down. These calculations — made by Columbia University social media researcher Jonathan Albright using CrowdTangle, an analytics tool from Facebook — underscore Jones’s agility in navigating his battle with what he calls “Big Tech.” A Facebook spokesman noted the company said in an Aug blog post it was taking down some but not all of Jones’s content. The post also said Facebook would assess allegations of misconduct against pages individually and would not necessarily ban the people maintaining pages even if the pages themselves were removed.