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"Infowars"host Alex Jones arrives at court in April for a child custody battle. — "Infowars" host Alex Jones arrives at court in April for a child custody battle.Credit:Austin American-Statement/AP

The videos have been removed and Infowars and Jones'pages"are close to being unpublished given recent community standards violations,"Facebook said in a statement.

In fact,Jones appeared on a livestreamed Facebook video on his page,shortly after the suspension went into effect,in which he claimed that he was the victim of a media conspiracy to"de-platform"conservative voices.

"This is war,"Jones said in the video.

This week,Facebook determined that one of Jones'recent videos — an inflammatory rant in which he accused Robert Mueller,the special counsel charged with the Russia probe,of supporting paedophilia and pantomimed shooting him — did not violate its policies.

"Our Community Standards make it clear that we prohibit content that encourages physical harm,or attacks someone based on their religious affiliation or gender identity[hate speech],"Facebook said."We remove content that violates our standards as soon as we're aware of it.

Content removals count as"strikes"against individual pages on Facebook. Pages maintained by Jones and Infowars have remained active because they have not crossed"a certain threshold of strikes"necessary for them to be unpublished,Facebook said.

On Tuesday,YouTube took down four videos uploaded to Jones'channel,which has 2.4 million subscribers,for violating its policies on hate speech and child endangerment. The violation placed a first strike against Jones'account on YouTube,preventing the channel from streaming live video for 90 days. If Jones receives two more strikes during that period,YouTube will terminate his account.

Infowars did not respond to a request for comment. Jones has defended the videos on Twitter as being"critical of liberalism."

Since founding Infowars in 1999,Jones has built a vast audience- his Facebook page has 1.7 million followers.

He first gained notoriety by insisting that the terrorist attacks of September 11,2001,were an"inside job"by the US government. Since then,he has questioned whether the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a hoax,promoted the so-called Pizzagate conspiracy theory which implicated Hillary Clinton's election campaign in a fictitious child-sex ring centred on a pizza restaurant,and said fluoridated water was part of a government mind-control plot.

The Facebook suspension means Jones cannot post on his personal profile or his pages and cannot message,comment or post anywhere else on Facebook. Other people are notified that he is banned,the company said.

This month,at a press event in New York about Facebook's efforts to combat misinformation and false news,a reporter from CNN questioned company executives about why Infowars was still allowed to have a Facebook account. At the time,the company appeared unwilling to say Jones'content violated its policies.

"Look,as abhorrent as some of this content can be,I do think that it gets down to this principle of giving people a voice,"Mark Zuckerberg,Facebook's chief executive,said in aRecode podcast interview.

Reuters,New York Times