Apple is now the only company to crack down on controversial news site InfoWars of Alex Jones.
Back on Sunday, Apple has removed five of the six podcasts streamable on its podcast apps and on its iTunes, explaining that it “does not tolerate hate speech” on its platform.
After the termination of InforWars podcast, iTunes users will not be able to search for InfoWars podcasts in the directory. The Real News with David Knight is the only podcast available right now.
Back in January, due to criticism from its community, Spotify has censored a number of InfoWars podcast.
An online radio service Stitcher has taken some similar steps, removing InfoWars podcasts from its platform following a review which concluded Alex Jones had “harassed or allowed harassment of private individuals and organizations”.
These bans have been extended to YouTube as well, where last month numerous videos from The Alex Jones Channel have been removed due to violations of community guidelines.
Initially, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a defensive stance, stating “as abhorrent as some of this content can be, I do think that it gets down to this principle of giving people a voice”, but then he changed his decision and spanked Alex Jones with a 30 days suspension for violating community standards.
Apple’s decision of removing InfoWars episodes can result in a reduction of the potential reach of the podcast.
However, iTunes is still much popular among music fans and recently, Apple Music has exceeded Spotify’s US paid subscriber numbers.
