Study: Alex Jones' videos are receiving nearly as many views on Facebook as they did before Infowars' page was banned, with new pages like NewsWars catching on
and so are his followers.” FB policy dictates that Infowars is banned but not Alex Jones; so he just starts another page. #stopthemadness http://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... http://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook removed Infowars and three other pages run by Alex Jones in August 2018 for repeated community-standards violations, following a shorter 30-day suspension of Jones' personal account that July. The Washington Post study now measures what that enforcement actually bought: view counts on Facebook back to near pre-ban levels, with successor pages like NewsWars picking up the displaced audience.
The finding fits a pattern already visible elsewhere in the coverage — secondary Infowars accounts kept operating on Twitter months after the main-account bans, and Facebook itself conceded the loophole in February 2019 when it banned 22 more Jones-linked Pages under a new policy targeting admins who repurpose old Pages with content from banned ones.
First-order effects
- The August page bans failed to remove Jones' reach on Facebook: per the study, his videos draw nearly as many views as before, because the policy bars named Pages but not the person behind them, who simply launches replacements like NewsWars.
- NewsWars and similar successor pages inherit the banned Infowars audience directly, converting each enforcement action into a rebranding event rather than a loss of distribution.
Second-order effects
- Facebook is forced into iterative policy work — the February 2019 update banning 22 repurposed Pages is a direct response to the admin-repurposing behavior this study documents, shifting enforcement from content to page ownership.
- The same whack-a-mole dynamic spreads cross-platform: Twitter's unremoved secondary Infowars accounts and YouTube's later takedown of the Resistance News mirror account show every platform hosting InfoWars content facing the identical enforcement gap.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform moderation migrates from removing individual Pages or videos toward actor-level enforcement — banning the operator across identities — which raises harder questions about how platforms define and verify who counts as the same publisher.
- Bans measured only at the page level become unreliable success metrics: as this study shows, audience retention through successor properties means platforms need reach-based measurement, not takedown counts, to judge whether moderation works.
The trend: Platform moderation of banned publishers is shifting from one-off page takedowns to repeated, actor-level enforcement cycles, as successors like NewsWars rebuild reach faster than policies can close the loopholes.