Last week, a report came out that human-sized garbage monster Alex Jones and his conspiracy theory distribution network InfoWars were facing a ban from YouTube after amassing two “strikes” against the video site’s policies on bullying and harassment. Specifically, Jones had supposedly gotten in trouble for videos in which he claimed that some of the students who survived the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida were actors, and he even reached out to one student, David Hogg, to try and get him back in YouTube’s good graces with a hypothetically fair interview.
Yesterday, though, Jones claimed that he had received a warning from YouTube that his page was going to be shut down today and that all of his 33,000 videos—which seems like so many—were going to be deleted. Unsurprisingly, it seems like Jones was lying about the whole thing to get attention and try to spin something “positive” out of a recent campaign to get advertisers to pull out of everything he touches with his hate-filled hands. That’s according to BuzzFeed’s senior tech writer, Charlie Warzel, who says he contacted YouTube and received confirmation that Jones’ story isn’t true:
On top of that, Warzel says YouTube did tell Jones that advertisers have been trying to remove themselves from the toxic bullshit he spews, but it didn’t say his page was facing imminent deletion. Plus, YouTube denies that it would even give someone a heads-up like this at all, so it seems like Jones just wanted to drum up a little support by playing off of the inescapable victim mentality that he and all of his far-right supporters love to encourage. (The earlier two-strike warning does seem to be real, just not Jones’ claim that YouTube was going to delete his page today.)
Alex Jones’ YouTube page is also still up, naturally.