Facebook on Tuesday removed 22 pages connected to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his fringe right-wing website InfoWars. The move came as part of a broader effort by Facebook to enforce its recently updated recidivism policy. 89 pages in total were unpublished on Tuesday afternoon as part of the crackdown, a Facebook spokesperson told CNN Business.
“We use a broad set of signals to determine if a Page violates our recidivism policy and determined these Pages violated our policy for reasons including having similar titles to the Pages we unpublished and having the same admins,” the Facebook spokesperson said.Facebook had removed four pages associated with Jones and InfoWars in August 2018, saying that the pages had violated its policies against hate speech, graphic violence, and bullying.
In late January, Facebook announced it had tightened its recidivism policy, aiming to prevent repeat offenders from using other pages they manage to continue behavior that violates the social media company’s rules.