Update (2/24/22): Following publication of this report, Spotify appears to have removed The Alex Jones Show from its platform.
Infowars’ The Alex Jones Show is streaming on Spotify, even though the platform banned all content from host Alex Jones and Infowars in 2018.
Jones is a far-right conspiracy theorist who has been sued over his false claim that the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting -- which killed 20 elementary school children and six educators -- was a hoax. Jones also helped fund the January 6 pro-Trump event that led to a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
The Alex Jones Show continues to be a relentless contributor to misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines and the election, and Jones and Infowars have been removed from every major social media platform.
Full-length episodes of The Alex Jones Show have been uploaded daily on Spotify since February 20 and remain undetected by the platform moderators. The Alex Jones Show is the first result that appears when searching ‘infowars’ on Spotify.
This oversight speaks to a larger problem of Spotify’s shoddy enforcement of its own rules and poor ability to detect extremist content. It comes amid an uptick in attention on the platform’s content standards because of hateful, inaccurate, and misleading content from podcast host Joe Rogan.
