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PayPal bans Infowars for promoting hate

PayPal bans Infowars for promoting hate

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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

PayPal will no longer do business with Infowars, according to a post on the conspiracy theory site this morning. PayPal broke the news in an email to Infowars yesterday, saying the company had conducted a comprehensive review of the Infowars site and found that it “promoted hate and discriminatory intolerance against certain communities and religions,” a violation of PayPal’s acceptable use policy. Infowars had used PayPal to process transactions for its on-site store; the site will have ten days to find new payment processors.

The move comes after a string of bans, which have effectively barred Infowars from distributing content on the internet’s major platforms. Facebook banned a number of Infowars pages in August after public pressure. YouTube, Twitter, the iOS App Store, and others followed Facebook’s lead in the weeks that followed. Infowars and its founder Alex Jones have drawn increasing criticism for harassment of the parents of Sandy Hook victims (whom Jones described as “crisis actors”) and persistent conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Clinton staffer Seth Rich.

PayPal’s partnership with the site was highlighted in August by Right Wing Watch’s Jared Holt, who described “highly publicized and egregious violations of the platform’s own terms of service.” Reached by The Verge, Holt said today’s move had been a long time coming. “Removing PayPal from the Infowars platform inhibits Jones’ ability to make money from his malice,” Holt said, “but it’s a bit odd it took so long given how egregiously Infowars violated the platform’s terms of service.”

Reached by The Verge, PayPal confirmed the ban, and said it extended to all Infowars-related sites. “Our values are the foundation for the decision we made this week,” a PayPal spokesperson said in a statement. “We undertook an extensive review of the Infowars sites, and found instances that promoted hate or discriminatory intolerance against certain communities and religions, which run counter to our core value of inclusion.”