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Notorious conspiracy theorist wiped from the web

Mr Jones is losing his social media reach, as he is sued for defamation.

Mr Jones is losing his social media reach, as he is sued for defamation.

Major tech companies have erased from the web most of the accounts linked to the internet’s most notorious peddler of conspiracy theories, Alex Jones.

The most recent to take action is Facebook, which on Tuesday removed four pages belonging to his Infowars show, for violating hate speech and bullying policies.

The suspension appears to be a first step towards permanent deletion.

“We offer pages the opportunity to appeal in case we made a mistake,” Facebook said in a statement.

“So our first step is to ‘unpublish’ the page so that it is no longer available on Facebook. If they don’t appeal or their appeal fails, we remove the page.”

It followed similar action by Apple, YouTube and Spotify.

The last remaining holdout of the top tech sites is Twitter, where Mr Jones and his company have more than a million followers across two accounts. Responding to mounting pressure, Twitter said Infowars was not in breach of its policies.

Mr Jones used the bans to put out a call to arms to his devoted fan base.

You have to understand now that Infowars is the most censored program in the world,” he said on Tuesday.

Mr Jones is most infamous for propagating the myth that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, and that the US Democratic Party was running a paedophile ring out of a pizza shop.

He has also claimed the September 11 terror attacks were carried out by the US government.

So many people believe his Sandy Hook claims that several parents of children killed in the shooting have been forced to flee their homes, because of near constant harassment from Infowars followers.

A gunman killed 20 students and six educators at the Connecticut primary school in December 2012.

Veronique De La Rosa and Leonard Pozner, parents of Noah Pozner, 6, who was killed, have said they can no longer easily visit their son’s grave because they have been forced to move into a high-security community hundreds of kilometres away.

“I would love to go see my son’s grave and I don’t get to do that, but we made the right decision,” Ms De La Rosa said in a recent interview.

“They [the conspiracy theorists] have their own community, and they have the ear of some very powerful people.”

Facebook’s ban may have been prompted by an open letter Ms De La Rosa and Mr Pozner sent to the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

In it, the parents urged him to ban “conspiracy groups and anti-government provocateurs” that were using the social media platform to propagate the hoax.

“Our families are in danger as a direct result of the hundreds of thousands of people who see and believe the lies and hate speech, which you have decided should be protected,” the parents wrote last month.

Mr Jones is being sued for defamation by Sandy Hook families.

He reportedly makes millions of dollars a year by using his show to advertise his own brand of diet pills and supplements.

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