Apple bans Infowars app from store: report

Apple has permanently banned Infowars’s app from its app store, just weeks after the tech giant announced it was monitoring the right-wing conspiracy newscast for possible content policy violations.

The company confirmed the app’s permanent removal from the digital store to BuzzFeed News on Friday, declining to issue a statement but referring reporters to the company’s content guidelines.

Apple announced last month that the app was under review following the removal of five Infowars podcasts from the iTunes store.

{mosads}“Podcasts that violate these guidelines are removed from our directory making them no longer searchable or available for download or streaming,” an Apple spokesperson said at the time. “We believe in representing a wide range of views, so long as people are respectful to those with differing opinions.”

The news comes a day after Twitter announced that it was permanently banning the conspiracy site and its founder Alex Jones from the platform.

The app store was a major source for traffic for Infowars, with BuzzFeed reporting that the app generated 600,000 hours of traffic for the site since its re-launch in July.

Infowars’s Jones was on Capitol Hill this week, where he was spotted attending hearings in the House and Senate attended by tech CEOs testifying on Russia’s election interference and alleged targeting of conservatives on their platforms.

After the hearings, Jones could be seen asking questions of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on camera as Dorsey was led away to a vehicle. A day later, Jones and Infowars were both permanently banned from Twitter.

The company cited video of Jones confronting CNN journalist Oliver Darcy as reason for Jones’s removal. In a video, Jones could be seen calling Darcy a “rat” and accosting him in the halls of Congress.

“Today, we permanently suspended @realalexjones and @infowars from Twitter and Periscope,” Twitter’s safety team wrote in a tweet Thursday.

“We took this action based on new reports of Tweets and videos posted yesterday that violate our abusive behavior policy, in addition to the accounts’ past violations,” Twitter added.

Tech companies have faced increased pressure in recent weeks to crack down on Jones over his past assertion of conspiracy theories centered around the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and the Parkland, Fla., school shooting earlier this year.

Companies such as Facebook, YouTube and Spotify have already removed Jones from their platforms.