PayPal Ends Business Dealings With Alex Jones' Infowars

Payments processor PayPal Holdings said on Friday it decided to end its business relationship with popular US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' Infowars website after finding instances of hate speech and discriminatory content on the site.

The move makes PayPal the latest tech company to take action against Jones, a deeply controversial right-wing radio talk-show host who has suggested that the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax, among other sensational claims.

"We've made a decision to end our relationship with Infowars websites, including PrisonPlanet," a PayPal spokesman said.

Companies such as Apple, Twitter, Google parent Alphabet, and Facebook have also banned Infowars and content produced by Jones.

"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," the PayPal spokesman said.

The most recent ban was Apple, which said it had banned from its App Store the Infowars app after finding that it had violated the company's rules against "objectionable content".

Prior to that, it was Twitter, which earlier this month banned Alex Jones and his website Infowars from its platform and Periscope, saying in a tweet that the accounts had violated its behaviour policies.

"As we continue to increase transparency around our rules and enforcement actions, we wanted to be open about this action, given the broad interest in this case," the company tweeted. "We do not typically comment on enforcement actions we take against individual accounts for their privacy."

In a video posted on the Infowars website on Thursday Jones said, "I was taken down not because we lied but because we tell the truth and because we were popular."

© Thomson Reuters 2018