Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been banned across social media, but this week he still found a megaphone.
Ye — the megastar formerly generally known as Kanye West — joined Jones’ far-right conspiracy theory outlet Thursday for an interview by which he announced his “love” for Adolf Hitler and Nazis. The unbridled antisemitism immediately captured the eye of the web. While the content was overwhelmingly denounced, the interview — and the antisemitism expressed in it — still reached thousands and thousands of individuals, due to reposted clips of the interview on mainstream social media platforms.
Now with clips of the interview being uploaded to YouTube, Google told NBC News in a press release that it’s working to remove reuploads if the antisemitism within the interview is not denounced within the video via added commentary. Other platforms like Twitter have yet to explicitly address that form of spread.
Jones is maybe best known for falsely claiming that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting didn’t occur. Jones and Infowars had already been banned from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Apple, YouTube, Spotify, Google Play, Vimeo, Pinterest, Mailchimp and LinkedIn.
Jones now hosts his content on his own video platform called Banned, where broadcasts typically get anywhere from about 10,000 views to barely greater than 1 million views.
But Ye’s interview had greater than 3.1 million views as of publication. It was already Jones’ most-viewed video on his platform.
On other platforms, clips of the interview got thousands and thousands more.
“Social media platforms reward probably the most contentious content, because individuals who oppose it engage with it to specific their disgust, their anger, to say it’s improper, and in doing so, platforms elevate that and provides it an algorithmic boost,” Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, said.
The backlash to Ye’s comments was swift and unprecedented, with major conservative figures who had aligned with Ye days and even hours before the interview moving to denounce him.
Late Thursday night, Ye tweeted screenshots of text messages purportedly between him and Elon Musk that showed Musk saying, “Sorry, but you’ve got gone too far. This isn’t love,” immediately attracting attention to Ye’s account and his interview that day.
Twitter suspended Ye later that night after Ye tweeted a picture that contained a swastika.
Despite the suspension, some reposts of the interview to Twitter have received greater than 3 million views.
Anti-hate groups and company advertisers have for years urged social media platforms to be vigilant about stopping the spread of online hate, arguing that sites resembling Facebook, Twitter and YouTube weren’t doing enough to implement their very own rules.
“Someone saying something is disgusting after which retweeting your complete video, that does nothing besides express disgust, nevertheless it actually then amplifies it to plenty of people,” Ahmed said.
“There may be an effect where it draws people back to the Infowars platform, because they need to know where it’s coming from. It starts to normalize the notion that this kind of content is on the market,” Ahmed said.
Some YouTube users were uploading full copies of the interview Friday, in response to an NBC News search of the platform. And while full, unedited copies had only just a few hundred views, right-wing commentators posted long clips from the interview mixing Ye’s antisemitic comments with their very own response. One in all those videos from a right-wing commentator had 307,000 views, giving Ye’s comments resembling “I really like Hitler” a big audience with little scrutiny.
“That is one among the largest problems in responding to online hate,” said Bond Benton, an associate professor of communication at Montclair State University. “There may be a certain segment of people that will see it and say, ‘My hateful views have now been normalized.’ And so they shall be that way more comfortable expressing them individually and acting on them.”
The highest search hits for Ye-related terms on YouTube were mostly videos from established news organizations giving context to the videos, but some commentators said they were torn about how much to debate it.
“The simple thing to do is to disregard it and never to speak about it, but I’ve got to speak about it because that is crazy,” said Greg Foreman, a conservative YouTuber in a 15-minute video with greater than 80,000 views. He showed clips of Ye praising Hitler, and Foreman speculated that his channel might get a “strike” from YouTube because of this.
“The Alex Jones Channel was terminated from YouTube in 2018, and in accordance with our circumvention policies, we’re removing third-party reuploads of his recent interview featuring Kanye West,” Jack Malon, a YouTube spokesperson, said in an email.
“We may allow a few of this content to stay on the platform, but only in cases where there may be condemnation of the hateful views that might otherwise violate our Community Guidelines,” he said.
On Facebook, some users uploaded short clips from the interview, often throughout the context of a news program but not at all times, in response to an NBC News search. However the clips without context appeared to have only a few views. One seven-minute video by which Ye makes antisemitic comments had only 48 views.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said it was following its established policy on “dangerous individuals and organizations.” Under that policy, Meta says it should “remove content that praises, substantively supports or represents ideologies that promote hate, resembling nazism and white supremacy.”
The highest post on Reddit on Thursday was a repost from the interview. Two other posts in the highest 20 Reddit posts that day were also reposts, and each videos contained the Infowars logo. The videos contained the particular segments of the interview when Ye praised Hitler and Nazis, portraying them in a shocking and negative light. Responding to NBC News, Reddit pointed to its content policies, which include banning content and communities that attack marginalized and vulnerable people and groups.
The most important social media platform where Ye still has a presence appears to be TikTok. His verified account there has 1.9 million followers, though as of Friday afternoon, his most up-to-date TikTok video was from Oct. 13.
One short clip of Ye’s interview without context had 82,700 views, and although searches on TikTok for Hitler’s name returned zero results, the one who posted the clip had used a slight variation of the name. The clip had greater than 300 comments, including some from individuals who sided with Ye.
TikTok didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment and for extra information on its enforcement.
“There may be a devastating consequence to the normalization of antisemitism,” Ahmed said. “Nobody must be reminded of what that may result in.”