After outrage from Sandy Hook families and others, Roku pulls Alex Jones’ Infowars
At his parents’ home in suburban Clarksville, Md., on Monday night, Daniel Madison and his brother were itching to see “Fyre Fraud,” the new Hulu documentary on the glorious failure of the 2017 music festival. So they set up a Roku player to stream it. But when he turned on the device, he could not believe what he was seeing: Infowars, the far-right conspiracy website founded by Alex Jones, which months earlier had been banned by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Apple, was available to stream on Roku for its nearly 24 million registered users.
“We were both shocked when we saw the app in the lineup,” Madison, 40, told The Washington Post on Tuesday. He knew Jones had been booted from most other major platforms for propagating conspiracy theories targeting the families of the Sandy Hook school shooting, which Infowars has called a hoax. “Wewere pretty grossed out,” he said.
Madison wasn’t the only one disgusted. By Tuesday, the mass discontent on social media, which was first reported by Digiday, bubbled over into a trending hashtag — #boycottroku. Some threatened to walk away from the product altogether. Roku even heard from lawyers representing the families of Sandy Hook victims, who say they continue to be threatened and harassed thanks to the InfoWarsspread conspiracy theory that the 2012 massacre that killed 27 people, including 20 children, didn’t happen.
By Tuesday night, Roku announced it, too, was banning Infowars.
Roku became the latest platform to drop Infowars, joining other media companies, including the likes of Spotify, Periscope and even YouPorn, to have bid farewell to Jones in the past year. Roku’s change of heart comes during a high period, with the company projecting to have generated $293 million in U.S. ad revenue last year, according to eMarketer, up 93 percent from 2017.
Jones has yet to publicly respond to Roku’s about-face, but he shared a cryptic post to his Instagram account on Tuesday night. The post, a Saturday tweet from Infowars reporter Owen Shroyer, featured an artistic banner of Jones’s face looking enraged. “Strike me down now and I only become more powerful,” Shroyer wrote.