While Apple's decision to remove five of Alex Jones' podcasts has caused many platforms to follow suit, Infowars' app is still available in the App Store
hint: It's a fudge Karissa Bell / Mashable : The InfoWars app is still alive and well in the App Store and Google Play Aja Romano / Vox : Apple banned Alex Jones's Infowars. Then the dominoes started to fall. Helen Holmes / Observer : To Understand the Crackdown on Alex Jones' Content, Look to Music Streaming Platforms Tweets: Rob Price / @robaeprice : Apple banned Alex Jones and Infowars from its podcast directory ... but you can still download the official Infowars app, because Apple's App Store has different rules. https://www.businessinsider.com/ ... @jimrutenberg : Tectonic shift or in-the-moment PR moves? Time will tell, but for now: Apple, Facebook and YouTube Remove Content From Alex Jones and Infowars @jacknicas reports http://www.nytimes.com/... Amy Brown / @arb : today i learned infowars was on pinterest lmao http://twitter.com/... Oliver Darcy / @oliverdarcy : Mashable reports that the InfoWars Pinterest page is down. http://mashable.com/... Thanks: @kifleswing See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's removal of five Alex Jones podcasts was the trigger for an industry-wide cascade: Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest followed with their own takedowns, and per NYT reporting, Mark Zuckerberg made his call to remove Infowars only after seeing news of Apple's move. What makes this article notable is the gap it exposes — Apple enforced its hate speech guidelines against the podcast directory while leaving the standalone Infowars app live in the App Store, since the two surfaces run under different rule sets.
The immediate aftermath cut both ways: Apple defended the split by saying the podcast violated its guidelines but the app did not violate App Store rules, yet the controversy itself became marketing — the app climbed from 47th to 4th in the US iOS news charts within a day of the bans.
First-order effects
- Infowars' distribution pivots from syndicated podcast feeds — where Apple, and then other platforms, could pull individual shows — to its own first-party app, which sits outside the directory rules Apple just applied.
- Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest are now positioned behind Apple's line: each has taken down Infowars content, but none controls the app channel that Apple's own store still hosts.
Second-order effects
- The bans function as promotion: the app's jump to 4th in US iOS news and top trending status on Google Play shows enforcement driving discovery, likely inflating direct-app engagement even as overall reach shrinks across the banned platforms.
- Apple faces pressure to reconcile its two rulebooks — if the podcast violates hate speech guidelines, competitors and advertisers can ask why the same publisher's app clears App Store review.
Third-order effects
- Platform moderation is converging on a single trigger point: one company's enforcement decision now sets the compliance clock for every major distributor, as the Zuckerberg timeline shows — and Apple itself eventually closed the loophole when it permanently banned the Infowars app about a month later.
- If enforcement reliably spikes demand for owned channels, publishers facing takedowns gain an incentive to pre-build direct-to-user distribution, weakening the leverage platforms hold at the feed level.
The trend: Content moderation decisions are cascading platform-to-platform with Apple as the de facto first mover, while enforcement itself redirects audiences toward owned apps that sit outside the original policy perimeter.