Setting what might be a new land-speed record for a brand shifting from “We’re committed to representing a diversity of viewpoints, even shitty ones” to “Jesus Christ, okay, calm down, it’s gone,” video on demand purveyor Roku has now pulled Alex Jones’ InfoWars channel from its Channel Store. The news comes just a handful of days after Jones and his cadre of high-volume, low-fact exiles (previously booted from Facebook, Apple, Spotify, and even eventually Twitter) landed on the platform, and just hours after the company issued a statement defending its willingness to give anybody—even screaming tomato men accusing the parents of murdered kids of trying to profit off of their children’s deaths—a genteel soap box from which to speak.
The backlash against InfoWars’ presence on the platform—which operates by offering free and premium “channels” of content to users of Roku’s digital media hardware—was as swift as a kid gleefully dubbing one of the show’s correspondents “a fucking idiot.” The company held its ground for a whole long afternoon, though, noting that “While the vast majority of all streaming on our platform is mainstream entertainment, voices on all sides of an issue or cause are free to operate a channel. We do not curate or censor based on viewpoint.” People were quick to point out the same things they wearily point out every time Jones’ show lands on a platform that’s ostensibly trying to limit its hosting of hate speech, though, i.e., that InfoWars the show is frequently anti-Muslim and xenophobic, and that Jones’ (now legally endangered) allegations against the families of kids killed in the Sandy Hook shootings have forced grieving parents to flee their homes because of death threats.
Apparently realizing the exact depth and unpleasantly fecal warmth of the issue it’d found itself stepping in, Roku issued a second statement later this evening, abruptly changing course: “After the InfoWars channel became available, we heard from concerned parties and have determined that the channel should be removed from our platform,” said Roku spokesman Eric Savitz, who we can only assume is the company’s vice president in charge of no shit, Sherlock. “Deletion from the channel store and platform has begun and will be completed shortly.”
92 Comments
With any luck soon he’ll be enjoying a new audience while broadcasting from his newly built studio in hell.
Offering my thoughts and prayers…
Alex Jones is the type of guy that Lucifer looks at and says, “No way am I getting mixed up in his shit.”
I honestly hope they have Lucifer say that on the show’s new Netflix season.
No, he’s quite ordinary and mundane. Don’t make anything real out of Jones, he’s just a loud idiot who would be forgotten already if not for Reminders of Importance such as this article.
He’s a loud idiot followed by death-threatening idiots who present real danger. Ignoring him because he’s “ordinary” is ridiculous. Ridiculing him because he’s an idiot is proper.
He’s the paranoid loudmouth idiot who has the nodding approval of one DJ Trump and HIS cadre of fucktards.
You guys are so righteous in your indignation, you don’t see how your keeping him in the public mind, is exactly the only way he can survive.
For months he was deplatformed and fading away, nobody speaking of him, nobody defending him. Now he’s back, 100% thanks to you.
I think it’s clear, Alex Jones exists more for you than he does for his followers. He’s such an important symbol for you, you can’t afford to let him disappear. I wish you would, but you never, ever will.
“who would be forgotten already if not for Reminders of Importance such as this article”Yeah, uh, the rubes who buy his shit (and also literally buy his shit) are the reason he’s a millionaire and still doing this shtick. But sure, let’s hang a pop culture website for pointing him out once in a while.
You even quoted the line, but wilfully StrawMan’d it. “such as” this article, doesn’t hang it on “a pop culture website”, it hangs it the pop culture website, the other website it linked to, the tv stations that were reporting…
….i’m not sure what you are arguing for or against, except “keep Alex Jones in the news” but why not do it without the rhetoric, without misrepresenting what i’m saying? You can see how clearly misinformation (like yours, and Alex Jones’s) works, you have enough upvotes to show the value of spinning truth into falsehood.
Clearly you know that if “the rubes who bought his shit” was enough, they’d all just hang out on the DarkWweb, or on on his private website, no problems— he’d make his money, they’d get their misinformation, everybody happy…. IF what you say is true. BUT they want a larger audience, for “some” reason (money? i bet it’s money). And YOU ARE ENSURING HE GETS IT.
you stop beating your dog yet, Captain?
TL;DR
You’re being too generous to his followers. The people who harassed the Sandy Hook parents with death threats weren’t tipped off because of A.V. Club articles. They are a hateful crazy LOUD fringe. Deplatforming is the best way to stop it from growing, not ignoring it.It’s like if you had black mold growing, and your choice was ignoring it, or a thorough industrial cleaning. If you ignore it, it will keep growing in the dark, as it has been doing for years. To be crystal clear, the deep clean I’m talking about isn’t about the cleansing civil war Jones fans often fantasize about, where the other side gets what’s coming to them, I’m just not accepting that this shit deserves a widespread platform. No company hosting Alex Jones gets my money. Anybody warning the world ‘this company is giving Alex Jones a platform’ is doing me a favor.
Hell, George Romero even did this as an episode for “Tales From the Dark Side”. Seriously. Hate-filled talk radio host spews his bile over the airwaves, and slowly notices that the call-ins are getting stranger and stranger — until he reaches up and realizes that he’s grown horns and a face that only a gargoyle could love. And gets a congratulatory phone call from Satan, thanking him for all the hate that’s drawn people into Hell with him.Wouldn’t surprise me at all if this is what’s awaiting Jones…
So do you think Jones looks back and thinks “maybe it was a mistake have essentially defended a mass murders at an elementary school by saying he didn’t really exist?” Naw, self reflection and empathy is beyond most right-wingers.Got to admit, if you had told me that this would be the hill that Alex Jones would have died on, I would have said bullshit. No way, couldn’t happen. Yet here we are, he went from being part of the conversation to effectively ceasing to exist except in the most very niche way all because there was no bridge to far to defend “gun rights”. Even in a circumstance where he didn’t have to invent things like “crisis actors” to do it. As we have since learned, mass murdering is now an accepted part of the American mainstream.
That’s two days too long. Nobody has a right to call grieving parents with young murdered children false flag villainous actors, no matter how much public interest work he does in exposing how the government is turning people gay and also the Jews did 9/11. Chemtrails.Fuck this guy. Fuck everybody who does business with him. Fuck Roku for doing it for two days. Fuck anybody who tries it again. Yes, he has an audience. David Koresh had an audience. David Duke has an audience. If you cater to that crazy hateful audience that harasses innocent victims with Alex Jones’s lies, fuck you sideways. Jim Jones also had an audience. It didn’t turn out well for anybody.
Look, if you’re too much of a snowflake to realise that the Reptozoids from deep within the planet’s core are infecting our yoghurt with Islam, I don’t know what to tell you.
But is it all yoghurt or only some yoghurt? Like, the low fat stuff, yeah, obviously that’s all Muslim’ed up, but the 100% Greek salted caramel crunch stuff, that’s good, right?!Asking for a friend.
Your “friend” is most likely a crisis actor. I have confirmation from deep state sources, where I also buy (with gold bars) all my colloidal silver.
Personally, I prefer to think of him as an opportunity actor.
Touché.
“Greek” yogurt is what makes the frogs gay and that leads to white genocide!!!
Well obviously, but is it still okay to eat?
To be fair, Greek Yogurt does kind of sound like a synonym for santorum.
THIS GUY SPELLS IT YOGHURT. HE’S ONE OF THEM.
tbh give me gay frogs and real men who bleed hot blood or whatever over these outrageously maudlin aaron sorkin monologues pls wow
I am glad SOMEBODY got my reference to the brilliant West Wing monologue fans know as ‘fuck all these shitbags.’I’m concerned that you have absolutely no idea what maudlin means, but amused that you heard the word somewhere with somebody attacking a progressive, and assumed it was equally applicable to any progressive. Words mean things. Maudlin refers to extreme sentimentality. My post is the opposite of that.LERN TO SPEKE MURRICAN YOU DUMBSHIT! Or at least limit yourself to words you understand.
Absolutely hilarious when ass babies try to use words.
the appeal to grieving parents with murdered children obviously fits any definition of maudlin. you did a good snappy one liner (epic) instead of 2 fat paragraphs of ugly crying which is commendable.
Defending the interests of grieving parents targeted with insane and sustained harassment isn’t sentimentality, it’s humanity. It’s rationality. Opposing a world where we let people get away with chasing grieving parents out of their homes with death threats founded on crazy lies isn’t pearl clutching, or garment rending. And there’s a difference between actual righteousness and self-righteousness. This isn’t about me.Your grasp on the English language remains tenuous at best. You know words. You just don’t know what they mean.
you’re not defending anything tho you were just monologuing on a website. you’ve staked out the least courageous position possible and are milking it like you marched with king or something. have some perspective lol
i’m just critiquing your performance, has nothing to do with politics. it is sentimental, obviously. don’t lie to me on the internet. it’s also bloviating, pearl clutching, garment rending, self righteous and obnoxiously self sucking. it’s just a lot all at once.
What the fuck, do you know how stupid and insensitive it is to say the government is turning people gay?I’ve been to every meeting of The Gays™ I was there when we decided we’d use communism and gender neutral toys to convert the next generation.
Sharia law is making my kids grow reptilian tails.
But i dont care about the sandy hook families or the dead children. Like, not one little bit. Why they deserve some kind of civil-rights erasing consideration is beyond me.
I don’t know which is worse – your appalling callousness or how badly misinformed you are. What part of the constitution guarantees you 1) the right to slander people with crazy lies, or 2) the right to a Roku channel?
Freedom of speech does not come from the US constitution, nor is it a concept limited to public institutions. The first amendment does not equal freedom of speech, and the US constitution is not the source or the scope of human rights. It doesnt even claim that it is.
So, you’re claiming having a Roku channel is a NATURAL right? I’d like to see you make that case. How about the right to slander? How do you justify that one?
A) Freedom of expression is a natural right, hell, its one of the big natural rights that everyone knows. Having a platform to speak is an essential part of freedom of expression, otherwise you can just say “You’re free to say anything you want, in this cell here”. So any one corporation being harassed into deplatforming him (make no mistake, this is an organized campaign by activists) is not a violation, but that same process being triggered again at every new place is a whole other kettle of fish.
B) Slander and Libel have a well established method of correction, lawsuits, and thats exactly what they did. But organized campaigns of harassment of corporations to get someone deplatformed is WORLDS more detestable than harassing victims of violent crime. Because one is a violation of a natural right, and one hurts someones feelings.
Im really running out of excuses why violence is not the answer to this activism.
The grieving parents of murdered children have been chased out of their homes by death threats. It isn’t a matter of ‘hurt feelings’. If Jones wants a platform, he is free to create one. I believe he has a website.“Im really running out of excuses why violence is not the answer to this activismYou’re now suggesting violence against the Sandy Hook parents and those who support them (such as myself) may be the answer. Either you’re deranged, or you’re trolling (which is still deranged.) Either way, fuck off, you piece of shit.
> The grieving parents of murdered children have been chased out of their homes by death threats. It isn’t a matter of ‘hurt feelings’. Cool, death threats are a crime and so is chasing people out of their houses. This is something we can handle with police intervention, imprisonment and reform. There is no need to engage in a campaign of targeted harassment against someone who didnt engage in death threats or chase them out of their homes.
> If Jones wants a platform, he is free to create one. I believe he has a website.
And you’re implying that people ARENT harassing site hosts, payment processors, DNS services and employees to prevent this?> You’re now suggesting violence against the Sandy Hook parents and those who support them (such as myself) may be the answer.
Once again, violence is regrettable but if people are ignoring the concept of natural rights to engage in social engineering, there isnt really any diplomatic solution to that. Is there? I’ve been trying for so many years.
Initiating violence is also a crime, asshole. But since you think Alex Jones has a natural right to a Roku channel, doesn’t that imply he has a natural right to a TV show? If you don’t think he has a right to a tv show, what is the logical distinction that justifies his ‘right’ to a Roku channel. And if he DOES have a right to a tv show, how do we determine which channel is to be forced to provide him one? Or does he have a right to a show on every channel? Your ‘arguments’ are absurd and riddled with inconsistencies. Again, you’re either trolling, an idiot, or (most likely) both.
> Initiating violence is also a crime, asshole.
So why hasnt he been brought up on charges and arrested? Thats actually a serious fucking crime that the police, not woke twitter, needs to handle. Here, do some reading on the most recent clarification of “Incitement to imminent unlawful action”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
“ The Court held that government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”[2][3]:702 Specifically, the Court struck down Ohio’s criminal syndicalism statute, ****because that statute broadly prohibited the mere advocacy of violence****. “ (And jones didnt even do THAT! Thats why you handle things on woke twitter, because the laws dont support your opinions)
*spikes football*
I wasn’t referring to him being guilty of incitement to violence, I was referring to your proposed ‘answer’ of initiating violence. “Im really running out of excuses why violence is not the answer to this activism”Funny how quickly your respect for the law dissipates when you’re losing an argument. You claim to be a champion of free speech, rights, and law, but you entertain the notion of silencing speech with vigilante violence. Explain your hypocrisy.
Easy done: You use the law as a tool when it suits you, and make new laws when it doesnt. Your personal position i’d wager is not much different. Isnt that the point of all the activism/Targeted harassment?
Also im very careful to follow the law until such time that it cant hurt me anymore. (Thats why im very careful to understand incitement to violence laws, something you seem a little fuzzy on, but that can easily be fixed)
You want to pass a law against deplatforming? I disagree with you. But that position (which is still absurd and unconstitutional, but I suppose the constitution could be amended) is much more reasonable than “Im really running out of excuses why violence is not the answer to this activism”.I’m glad I was able to correct at least one of the flaws in your thinking.
Law wouldnt even be the ideal method, much less violence. Social stigma is. People should be ashamed to employ campaigns of targeted harassment against people they dont like. These companies dont come to these conclusions on their own, they just want money. A journalist working with an activist group or two writes an editorial, and tons of paid activists (such as ‘media matters’, to use one notable example of such an organization) bombards them with calls saying something like “Tomorrow in the wall street journal there is going to be an article about you, we suggest you cut yourself off from (person i dont like)”.
These are literal mafia style “Nice kids/family you got there, it’d be a shame if anything happened to them (tapping baseball bat into palm)” tactics. If distaste and/or shame dont stop that kind of thing, its difficult to fix with laws. So extrajudicial violence increasingly is looking like the step after that. Again, i’m thinking daily how to fight these people legally. Violent revolutions very rarely go the way you want them to go, as i bring up when people on this very blog have Guillotine fantasies about the current government
So, you DO support using social stigma to limit the scope of people’s messages – you just want to use it against Media Matters instead of Alex Jones. They’re using your preferred method, they’re just way, way better at it.On the off chance you’re actually considering shooting up Media Matters to silence them, I’m not going to goad you by calling you the classic internet tough guy. I am instead going to sincerely suggest you seek psychiatric intervention. If you support free speech, obviously you can’t justify murdering people because you don’t like what they’re saying.
Deplaforminig, the other version of free speech? May your angry rants be subjecated to wherever. Just yell in a hole.
It kind of is, actually.
Deplatforming is, at its core, the free speech of the market at work.
The owners of the platforms decide, for one reason or another, that they feel Jones’s presence on their platform is detrimental to their bottom line.
Like any problem client or customer, the owners are well within their rights to say “Yeah, you need to go.”
Cynical as fuck, but actually completely within the grounds of free speech. These platforms aren’t nationalized, so they’re not obligated to put him up if they think he’s more trouble than he’s worth to them.
Conversely, the premise only promises you’re free to say whatever the Hell you like, it never says you’re free from the consequences of what you say – this wasn’t a law censoring him, this was Jones finding out the hard way the pendulum of saying whatever the fuck you feel like can swing back at you.
Man, this was an uncharacteristically poor choice from the Avatar of the Fire Nation.
There is no proof that the air nation genocide happened. It’s a bender conspiracy
In fact, I question the very existence of these so called Air Nomads at all. All paid Crisis Benders, I tell ya.
“The world isn’t controlled by who you think. A secret organization of high ranking members of government and schools are gathering under the guise of simple games of Pai Sho. Who are these “White Lotus”? I say they are part of the Repitleabear conspiracy!”
The fifth element, the Truth Benders.
FIREBENDING CAN’T MELT STEEL BEAMS!
Death threats that force grieving parents to change locations? What the fuck is wrong with your country?How brazen has everyone become with death threats? How are those people not in jail or mental institution? I mean, they are traceable. Let all those people who are in jail for weed go, and put in these fucking dangerous shitheads, who need to be isolated from functioning society. How is it that everyone who’s done that not on trial?Sure, they’re just “the other side”. In no way those people are terrorists.What the fuck…
The fact that threats aren’t prosecuted as much as they ought to be is a travesty. Or that death threats online don’t matter because it’s the internet.
Death threats are the new version of calling someone a name. Welcome to 2019 America.
They are traceable, but the FBI has a very bad record of deciding not to prosecute.
After their children were gunned down and very little was done about it, how are you expecting anything from America?
When you say “very little,” did you have a single thing in mind that was done about it? My recollection is “literally nothing.”
Death threats are a great American tradition, it’s nothing new at all.
“mental institution”Reagan closed all of them down.
“what the fuck is wrong with your country”? Neither of us has enough time to unpack that whole list.
What the fuck is wrong with your country?Statistically, probably many of the same things that are wrong with yours? No, go ahead, tell me where you live that things are great, and I am sure that we can generate a short list of horrifyingly fucked up shit your countrymen have perpetuated within the last 2 decades.
I’ll wait.
No, your face is stupid.
When tens of thousands of people are focused on something, there is bound to be a half dozen or so crazy assholes. See every “This wamin of color was harassed off of twitter” story. While having 6-12-20 people spend their whole day harassing you is fucking awful, its a fraction of a fraction of a percentage, and that condemnation should not extend to all critical voices.
Fuck Roku. Send them to the trash heap as a forgettable streaming service provider that has no moral compass. Any company that needs to wait for backlash to do the right thing is garbage. Especially when the topic at hand is giving a guy who attacks grieving families a platform.Again fuck Roku. Please stop using it if you have it.
Nope, gonna keep using it. I’ll ostracize the Alex Jones shitheads of the world, not the Roku. kthx.
It might not even be about the backlash. Because the Sandy Hook family lawsuit is going ahead, a lot of media companies are apparently worried about being found culpable. There’s a good chance Roku’s lawyers stepped in and told them to get rid of him.
I’m pretty sure they ran this by their lawyers ahead of time. I suspect they just thought they’d get a subscription bump and badly underestimated how their existing base would react to having a garbage truck of toxic crazy dumped on their playground.
It’s kind of worth noting that Roku isn’t a streaming service, it’s a streaming player platform. As far as I know, they don’t collect money from the channel providers on their service, so they really wouldn’t benefit from subscribers to an InfoWars except for InfoWars viewers buying Roku devices to stream on their TVs. And even then, I’d bet the die-hard Jones fans have already worked out ways to get their daily dose of that sack of shit without buying a new device.
Good.
Roku is not a streaming service provider. It’s just a device like the Firestick or Apple TV.
It took Roku much less time than it took Apple and Google. Your opinion is kind of useless: boycott for life because they took far less time than any competitor? This is one of those left-wing “purity of essence” takes which serves primarily to support right-wingers.
Can we get him banned from the planet?
I hear there are…..ways….
The blood clot is working on that as we speak.
How could Rotku not anticipate this? (maybe they thought the controversy would give them a rating boost, but come on even most racists and islamophobes give Alex Jones a wide berth). That he gets any platform to speak at all is sickening – his lawyer claimed he was a “performance artist”. He isn’t, he’s a slug with no remorse for making the lives of grieving parents hell. Trump said Jones’s reputation was “amazing” before he kicked him to the curb – that’s actually scary.
FYI roku is not a streaming service provider and does not rely on ratings. They do not produce any content at all. It’s just a device, like Apple TV or the Fire Stick, with which you can view Netflix, Hulu, etc. Besides those streaming companies, just about any yokel can create their own Roku channel. I’ve seen channels for everything from toy trains to traffic cam footage. Every church denomination no matter how small or podunk seems to have a roku channel. All Roku did was remove Infowars from their hundreds of publicly available channels.
REEEEEEEEEEE
Hate is not viewpoint.
I like how people who listen to “Mr. Jones” can believe in “false-flag operations” and “gay frogs,” but Russia interfering in an election is too implausible.
In order for them to believe Russia interfered in the election, they would first need to admit that things like Benghazi, Pizzagate, and emails!!, along with false-flag operations and gay frogs, were all part of a long term misinformation campaign in which they willingly participated.
They’re too stupid to do that.
death by a million shares. The way groups started as one thing then slowly changed is nuts. The identifiacation and promoting is why the maga hat was a great idea. I can’t think of any other clothing item that defined a political candidate. Like there is an embassing photo of me wearing socks and sandals (it was the 90s) but that was a decade before facebook. That is public identity that will never be lived down, only cementing their devotion.
Cause anyone can make sense of that. It takes a truly advanced thinker to crack the mysteries of *checks notes* child sex slaves on Mars?
…are we absolutely sure this man isn’t abusing some manner of illegal drug?
(Actually, to his credit, the QAnon crowd gives his fanbase a run for their money in terms of their abject willingness to swallow horseshit to either hold onto their belief in their higher intelligence or unwillingness to admit they got duped.)
Wonder if they did the math and the math indicated that they would ultimately lose more subscribers than gain.
“Jesus Christ, okay, calm down, it’s gone.”Man, it would have been great if that had been Roku’s official statement.
How did InfoWars not already have a Roku channel before two days ago? Have you seen what gets to be a Roku channel?
I’m only recently even learning what a Roku is (seriously, I could use some explanation, as my supposedly-too-old tv won’t support the HBO Go app any more). But I do know that Roku isn’t a country or a government – why would the decision even be made that Alex Jones et al deserve a podium? If Roku took them on because they thought they’d make a profit, that seems pretty hasty, and bad business – they also look at the downward spiral Info Wars has been in? Even if you ignore the batshit, cruel insanity that Jones spits out.. it’s not lucrative batshit cruel insanity any more, is it?
Remember kids, when we do it its “A campaign of targeted harassment” but when you do it, its “Activism”.