- Vimeo is the latest platform to removed InfoWars’ account from its platform, following Facebook and YouTube.
- InfoWars’ videos violated the company’s Terms of Service prohibitions on discriminatory and hateful content, a Vimeo spokesperson told Business Insider.
- InfoWars also became a hot-button topic at Vimeo last week, Business Insider has learned, with several employees at the company dissatisfied with its handling of the issue.
Vimeo has removed Alex Jones’ InfoWars from its platform for violating the company’s Terms of Service standards, a Vimeo spokesperson told Business Insider on Sunday.
The videos, posted on Thursday and Friday “violated our Terms of Service prohibitions on discriminatory and hateful content,” the spokesperson said, adding that Vimeo had notified the account owner and issued a refund, as “we do not want to profit from content of this nature in any way.”
InfoWars became a hot-button topic internally at Vimeo last week, Business Insider has learned, with several employees at the company upset that the account was allowed to remain on the platform. Employees took to messaging platform Slack to discuss their dissatisfaction with the company’s handling of the issue, sources said.
Vimeo’s decision comes on the heels of Facebook, YouTube and Apple recently removing videos by InfoWars and its founder Alex Jones. In the videos, he denounced Muslim immigrants to Europe and the creators of a transgender cartoon. Twitter, on the other hand, has yet to remove Jones or InfoWars from its platform.
InfoWars had fewer than a dozen videos on Vimeo as of Wednesday according to the company, which mostly discussed the banning of their content on other platforms. On Thursday and Friday, however, InfoWars uploaded over 50 new videos and hours of aggregate footage.
That content was manually reviewed by Vimeo's Trust & Safety team, and a violation was determined within 48 hours of the videos being added before being removed.
Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud is expected to announce the company's decision to remove InfoWars at a Town Hall meeting scheduled for 9 a.m. Monday, August 13 in New York.
Since founding InfoWars in 1999, Jones has managed to amass a massive audience. Some of his most extreme theories include the suggestion that the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington were staged by the government.
Jones was also sued for defamation by the parents of two children who died in the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre in Connecticut in April. They accuse him and Infowars of engaging in a campaign of "false, cruel, and dangerous assertions."