Alex Jones on Saturday claimed that YouTube is going to delete his Infowars channel on Sunday. According to YouTube, that’s simply not true.
This is what Jones—the far-right conspiracy theorist whose channel was given two strikes by YouTube last week for his videos covering the Parkland shooting, pushing him only one step away from deletion—tweeted Saturday.
The Alex Jones channel with billions of views is frozen. We have been told it will be deleted tomorrow and all 33 thousands videos will be erased. We just set up this new page subscribe if you want to see what the SPLC wants censored.. https://t.co/0sGkMNUCPt
— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) March 4, 2018
But according to BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel, YouTube doesn’t have current plans to erase Jones’ channel.
I reached out to YouTube about this – it’s not true. Been informed there’s no plan to erase the channel tomorrow, as Jones says. https://t.co/VFiAIesB8A
— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) March 4, 2018
Some more, according to YouTube:
— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) March 4, 2018
YT DID tell Jones that advertisers reached out and asked to be removed from channel. But YT didnt tell Jones what he claims. Furthermore, YT says this isn’t even how the account termination process happens (getting advance warning)
Jones has had a tough week. He faced sexual harassment and anti-Semitism charges by two former employees, he begged a teenager to stop defaming him, and a number of YouTube advertisers pulled their ads from his channel.
Jones, who has 2.2 million subscribers with more than 1.5 billion views, also set up a new YouTube channel, called Infowars Censored, where he’s already posted nine videos.
Update 1:14pm CT: YouTube made a similar statement to the Daily Dot on Sunday afternoon, saying it did not tell Jones his channel would be deleted and that it had no plans to terminate his account on Sunday.