Infowars host Alex Jones has found a new platform to spew his hate speech.
Social networking site Tumblr announced Wednesday that it was “closely monitoring” Jones’ Infowars page after other major companies kicked the serial harasser off their platforms.
In a statement to HuffPost, Tumblr said it would take action if they find violations to their policy after Jones’ page recently became active on the platform again. But they did not go so far as to say they would remove the page. (Tumblr and HuffPost are both owned by Verizon.)
“Alex Jones and Infowars had been inactive on Tumblr for nearly a year until this week when they began posting again,” the company said in a statement. “We are closely monitoring this matter and will take action if there are violations of our policy.”
Jones has peddled dangerous conspiracy theories for years and is currently facing five separate defamation lawsuits, including three from parents of students killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. In those suits, Jones is accused of calling the parents “crisis actors,” saying the shooting was faked and leading his legion of followers to harass the victims’ families, according to the suits.
Only a smattering of posts had appeared on Jones’ Tumblr page, which was established in 2012 before it went dark in 2017. They promoted spectacularly dumb conspiracies, including a May 2017 post titled “Study Proves Unvaccinated Children Are Healthier” and a February 2016 post titled “Mobile Phones Are ‘Cooking’ Men’s Sperm.”
Other posts were downright racist and Islamophobic, including a 2015 post titled “Obama Brings In 13,000+ Muslims Who Support Suicide Bombings ― Per Year.” (There is absolutely no evidence to suggest this is true.)
But the Tumblr posts picked up again on Monday, more than a week after YouTube, Facebook and Spotify all took down Jones’ content due to its promotion of hate speech and harassment. On Tuesday, Infowars’ website went down, though it was not immediately clear why.
On Infowars’ Twitter page ― which was suspended for a week late Tuesday after he urged his viewers to get their “battle rifles” ready ― the conspiracy outlet tweeted Monday, “They’ll never take our Tumblr.” Jones himself retweeted it.