InfoWars Blacklisted By Major Advertisers After CNN's Guerrilla Activism
Content adapted from this Zerohedge.com article : Source
Not content to let YouTube and Facebook be the dominant players in the censorship game, now CNN entered the mix. It is coming out that CNN is contacting all advertisers on the Alex Jones YouTube channel resulting in many major brands blacklisting the channel.
CNN has discovered ads on InfoWars' channels from companies and organizations such as Nike (NKE), Acer, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Network, the Mormon Church, Moen, Expedia (EXPE), Alibaba (BABA), HomeAway, Mozilla, the NRA, Honey, Wix and ClassPass.
Even an ad for USA for UNHCR, a group that supports the UN refugee agency UNHCR, asking for donations for Rohingya refugees was shown on an InfoWars YouTube channel.
Many of the brands -- including Nike, Moen, Expedia, Acer, ClassPass, Honey, Alibaba and OneFamily -- have suspended ads on InfoWars' channels after being contacted by CNN for comment. The companies, with the exception of Alibaba, which declined to comment, said they had been unaware their ads were running on The Alex Jones Channel. CNN discovered the HomeAway advertising shortly before publishing this story, and has not yet received a response from that company.
Ads were purchased mostly through YouTube which then directs them based upon the demographics. Companies can blacklist those channels they do not want to advertise on.
Jones' YouTube channel was subject to two strikes in the past few weeks. YouTube quickly (and silently) removed the second strike. Of late, many conspiracy and conservative sites were targeted by the meda-site since the Parkland shooting incident.
YouTube blamed the actions on the screeners.
"As we work to hire rapidly and ramp up our policy enforcement teams throughout 2018, newer members may misapply some of our policies resulting in mistaken removals," wrote a YouTube spokesman in an email. "We’re continuing to enforce our existing policies regarding harmful and dangerous content, they have not changed. We’ll reinstate any videos that were removed in error."
This is not the first time Alex Jones endured this. Last February, Infowars was dropped by San Francisco ad agency AdRoll.
AdRoll told Jones that they were dropping him due to the fact that products are "retargeted" to the InfoWars website - a practice of relevant advertisements jumping from site to site to follow consumer browsing habits.
Being based in San Francisco, it is not difficult to conclude the political leanings of this agency. Further adding to the speculation are donations given by various members of AdRoll to Democratic causes.
Interestingly, AdRoll's head of retargeting, Peter Clark, contributed to the "Democratic Hope Fund" in 2015.
InfoWars now has a battle on many fronts to fight.
Non-adapted content found at zerohedge.com: Source
lol CNN took away $169.00 from Alex Jones. In exchange he gets a front page article from CNN that he can use to prove Big Tech is censoring and attacking him. This CNN hit piece is worth six figures and it’s memetically powerful FOR Jones. This war is getting personal. InfoWars created t-shirt campaign against CNN.
It’s fun to watch. If I didn’t know Fake News CNN, I would say “Breaking story”, but this whole thing is just a comedy. It all plays well for Alex Jones and his Chanel. I believe in this case the winner is @infowars, and the losers @Google, @YouTube, @facebook , @twitter and @CNN are only driving content providers and their audiences away and at the same time is opening the door to alternative platforms. I’m really anxious to see how this all eventually plays out, including all these sponsors of info wars. I personally believe that alternative media will take over when it comes to average people, with mainstream medial being just a puppets of the governments who keep them on payroll to keep them alive.
It wouldn't be at all surprising to see this blow over, at least where Alex Jones' channel is concerned, and like you say this situation only serves to feed this idea that he is constantly 'under attack' from the mainstream. The reality is that InfoWars IS mainstream at this point.
It's crazy to see major corporations choosing political sides, like a corporate red scare but not against foreign communists but instead against domestic dissenters.
Thank God I preserved this on the block chain forever
They can't possibly claim that they're only going after content that violates their policies. Even liberal centrists like Sargon of Akkad have felt the hammer from this new round of pummelling - let's call it what it is at this point; an attempt to censor ideas that do not follow the stream of ideas belonging to the liberal left. This is ideological warfare through social media, but what's more alarming is that we have allowed for corporatism and their affiliate political beliefs drive this dangerous vehicle of censorship. Even so, this is going to cause a Streisand effect of epic proportions, so it'll only be good for Alex Jones for the future.
I think this will be really good for alt tech/alt media in the future, as well. It sucks to watch these guys get censored, but it opens opportunity to bring their followers to better platforms for free speech. I'm wondering how the social media landscape is going to look two years from now.
Yeah, I mean the change to alt media, as you say, is long overdue. I really hope those upcoming tech companies that do promote free speech are kept in line of their core foundation and do not drift for corporate interests through buyouts and takeovers. Money is always an incentive and I won't be surprised if Google exerts its influence over those rising companies. Not to mention the cooperative nature of the already existing giants that work toward mutual benefit. We've seen this happen with YouTube and Google and before Google bought it in 2006 for $1.6 billion, it was also aiming to keep in line with its core foundation, but nope! We're likely to see something happen in the future shall some alternatives arrive to bring some level of competition.
American is a corporatracy.
The corporations run the show here. This is what capitalism (or crony) morphed into. The corporations have the money to grease the wheels of the system as they like.
So now they are so big (monopolistic in many way) that they can do what they want. Here is an example of it in action. Alex Jones is a lot of things but he does have the right to express what he does AND to profit off it from advertisers. Sure companies have the right to choose who they advertise with also. Yet this situation looks like they are being cooerved.
Each time I read something like this, I just say to myself, decentralization is needed.
We need to break the stranglehold these entities have.
Inforwars went far this time but thats not worth the attack they are having on it. Google, youtube, facebook, CNN.. These are giant media platforms. The acts of inforwars completely have no influence on the massive profits these firms are making. Besides if it's about the contradictory content.. we've seen worse contradictory content broadcast on google, facebook and youtube. And since such contradictory content generates huge revenue for these media platforms, they are left to continue contradicting what people take in. This fight could be aimed at pushing Inforwars out of competition which it had started creating with the big stats it was hitting; the record number of viewers and subscribers it had set.
These advertisers need to come together and protest this injustice. A law suit has got to be opened against these giant media platforms especially CNN which is influencing advertisers to blacklist Inforwars. Inforwars too has rights as a media platform which need to be respected.
Youtube and CNN are going down a very dangerous path. This has to be stopped - whether you like Alex Jones or not, free speech is at high risk now - not only from government, but from corporate interests.
What if Alex jones join steemmit??
Votes and resteemit done
good information may be the time for media @zer0hedge
Nice post.. thanks for information