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Google has finally kicked the Infowars app from its Play Store, the company confirmed to multiple
outlets Friday. The tech giant’s app store was one of the last major bastions for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, as his show (and all the extremist views and
“Now more than ever, combating misinformation on the Play Store is a top priority for the team, ”a Google spokesperson told Wired. “When we find apps that violate Play policy by distributing misleading or harmful information, we remove them from the store.”
Before it was removed, the InfoWars app had more than , downloads, Wired reported. It hosted broadcasts of InfoWars programming like The Alex Jones (show and directed users to the site’s store that, until a recent cease-and-desist letter , hawked phony toothpaste under the false pretense that it “kills the whole SARS-corona family at point -blank range. ”
Jones disputed Google’s decision in a response posted to InfoWars’ video platform (
. In a winding rant, he attributed the takedown to an anti-American, anti-Trump conspiracy among big tech players. The controversial video in question, he explained, was flagged because he shared supposed treatments for the novel coronavirus outbreak — none of which
or [[“Embedded Url”,”External link”,”https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/16/facebook-reddit-google-linkedin-microsoft-twitter-and-youtube-issue-joint-statement-on-misinformation/”,{“metric25”:1}] ) proven effective by the medical com munity at large.
“This is next level suppression of free speech and the American people, ”Jones said in one of several videos responding to Google’s ban. Ironically, during the process of defending himself, Jones double-downed on his previous claims that social distancing practices are “un-American,” which is likely one of the examples of harmful information that led to Google’s decision in the first place.
Apple decided back in 2020 to
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