Alex Jones Said Bans Would Strengthen Him. He Was Wrong.

After Silicon Valley internet giants mostly barred Alex Jones from their services in Aug, traffic to his Infowars website and app soared on the blaze of publicity — and the notorious conspiracy theorist declared victory. “The more I’m persecuted, the stronger I get,” Jones said on his live internet broadcast three days later. “It backfired.” Yet a review of Infowars’s traffic several weeks after the bans shows that the tech companies drastically reduced Jones’s reach by cutting off his primary distribution channels: YouTube and Facebook.

In the three weeks before the Aug. 6 bans, Infowars had a daily average of nearly 1.4 million visits to its website and views of videos posted by its main YouTube and Facebook pages. In the three weeks afterward, its audience fell by roughly half, to about 715,000 site visits and video views.  The analysis did not include traffic to the two-month-old Infowars app or views of videos that Jones posted on Twitter, where his accounts remain active. That Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube, muffled one of the internet’s loudest voices so quickly illustrates the tremendous influence a few internet companies have over public discourse and the spread of information.