PayPal cuts off Alex Jones' Infowars, joining other tech companies

Most of the firms said the site had violated their policies by promoting hate speech and misinformation

PayPal is the latest tech giant to cut off Infowars, the conspiracy website run by right-wing provocateur Alex Jones.

Infowars was informed by PayPal on Thursday night that it would have 10 business days to find a new payment processor.

PayPal handles all transactions, including credit cards, for the Infowars online store. The store has been a significant source of revenue for the company, selling vitamins and nutritional supplements, as well as Infowars-branded apparel. PayPal has also handled donations that Infowars receives from its supporters.

PayPal acted weeks after Twitter, Facebook and other large tech companies blocked Infowars from their services. Most of those companies said the site had violated their policies by promoting hate speech and misinformation.

PayPal said it had made its decision not because of any policy violation but because Infowars’ “promotion of hate and discrimination runs counter to our core value of inclusion.”

“Our values are the foundation for the decision we made this week,” PayPal added.

The aggressive steps against Infowars have become fodder for claims that Silicon Valley companies are biased against conservative voices — an opinion expressed by President Trump and a number of Republican officials. Jeff Sessions, the US attorney general, plans to meet with Republican state attorneys general next week to discuss the tech industry, competition and free speech.

Jones attended a recent Senate hearing where Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg discussed efforts by their companies to deal with disinformation on their platforms. And after a separate House hearing that directly addressed Republican claims that Twitter was biased against conservatives, Jones tried to confront Dorsey on Dorsey’s way out.

After the phaseout period of 10 business days, PayPal will stop doing any business with Infowars and its subsidiaries, like the site Prison Planet, said a PayPal spokesman. The spokesman declined to cite any specific problems that had led to the decision, but said that after “extensive reviews” it had “found many instances of content that promoted hate and discriminatory intolerance against certain communities and religions.”

This is not the first time PayPal has waded into politically fraught territory. In 2010, it cut off payments to WikiLeaks. More recently, PayPal stopped working with neo-Nazi and alt-right websites. 

Since being barred from Facebook and Twitter, Infowars has had to find new online platforms, and its audience has fallen off significantly. But PayPal’s decision may be particularly damaging, because it will be much harder for Infowars to find another company to handle transactions for the site.

© 2018 The New York Times