Google & YouTube Ban Alex Jones

Google & YouTube Ban Alex Jones

November 30, 2010

PrisonPlanet.com and Infowars.com have been blocked from its search results, effectively censoring their content from wide web coverage. Only smaller sites that re-post the content have appeared in Google searches since early November.

In a separate matter, TheAlexJonesChannel on YouTube has learned that it will be either frozen or blocked from uploading new content for several weeks following a “Community Guidelines” violation decision. According to YouTube’s support team, users from its site flagged a video on the channel that contained controversial video of the Apache helicopter “collateral murder” that occurred in Iraq in 2007 and was released by Wikileaks. When TheAlexJonesChannel attempted to challenge the removal of this video via YouTube’s counter-notification form, it was subsequently told that the account would be disabled and new content blocked (apparently due to the challenge, as no other strikes exist on the account).

The graphic content in the video– which documents real events the Pentagon never wanted released– has been posted by hundreds of other channels on YouTube, including major media outlets like CBS News and Russia Today without being flagged or removed, yet TheAlexJonesChannel has been told that its posting of a smaller portion of this incident is offensive or otherwise against its community guidelines. This appears to be double standard as even the age-verification barrier set-up for some of the postings was not offered for TheAlexJonesChannel version; it was simple deleted by user demand and YouTube mandate.

It is evident that the system revels in any chance to dampen the loud voice that Alex Jones, Infowars.com/PrisonPlanet.com and its supporters have raised on the Internet, effectively challenging the status quo and mainstream media spin on major news and events. With the easy passage of the web censorship bill, it is further clear that what is happening now to Infowars.com and Alex Jones will soon happen to anyone without a politically-correct message, particularly when that message is capable of resonating throughout large parts of the globe.

It is up to supporters and lovers of freedom to challenge censorship and oppression on the web, because only resistance can slow the attempts to curtail free speech and expression online. As Frederick Douglass said, “Find out just what the people will submit to and you’ve found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” This will be prove to be more true than ever in the age of the Internet.

Notice from YouTube’s copyright support that Infowars.com will be blocked from uploading any videos for two weeks, following a community guidelines strike against the widely distributed controversial Wikileaks video of the 2007 Apache helicopter incident in Iraq.