Infowars Now One Strike Away From Permanent YouTube Ban After Receiving Second Strike

InfoWars, a far-right media organization run by Alex Jones and known for peddling dangerous and offensive conspiracy theories including PizzaGate, is reportedly one strike away from being deleted and permanently removed from YouTube, reports The Hill.

Infowars said it received an alert from YouTube on Tuesday morning notifying the far-right conspiracy theory outlet that they had been hit with a second strike and would be unable to post “new content to YouTube for two weeks.”

.@WillSommer reports InfoWars has received its second strike on their YouTube channel for another offensive Florida shooting video. If InfoWars receives another strike, they will be permanently banned from the site. pic.twitter.com/4hOSSqt7Rp

— TOᑭ ᖇOᑭE TᖇAViS 🇺🇸 (@TopRopeTravis) February 27, 2018

“This is the second strike applied to your account within three months. As a result, you’re unable to post new content to YouTube for two weeks,” the YouTube alert said. “If there are no further issues, the ability to upload will be automatically restored after this two week period.”

The conspiracy channel reportedly received a second strike on a video about the Parkland, Fla. high school shooting.

The Alex Jones Channel, Infowars’ most followed YouTube account, had received its first strike last week after posting a video titled “David Hogg Can’t Remember His lines In TV Interview,” which was taken down on Wednesday after the platform said it violated its policies against harassment.

That video had singled out student David Hogg, who has spoken out publicly after the shooting. It depicted Hogg and other students as “crisis actors” — a term used by conspiracy theorists who believe that mass shootings like Parkland are staged events to drum up support for gun control, reports The Hill.

Jones made similar claims in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in Newtown, Conn.

“The fact that these people refuse to believe something like this could happen is something that all of us don’t want to believe, but that said truth is that it is,” Hogg said in response to the claims made in Jones’ video. “These people saying this is absolutely disturbing.”

“Last summer we updated the application of our harassment policy to include hoax videos that target the victims of these tragedies,” a YouTube spokesperson told CNN last week. “Any video flagged to us that violates this policy is reviewed and then removed.”

YouTube’s community guidelines say if an account receives three strikes in three months, the account is terminated.

Infowars has called the strikes a “CNN lobbying campaign.”