Dozens of leading brands pull ads from far right conspiracy site InfoWars' YouTube channel
Many of the brands say they were not aware their adverts were being shown on the channel
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Your support makes all the difference.Several leading brands have reportedly sought to pull their ads from YouTube channels of the far-right conspiracy site InfoWars.
Ads from a number of major firms and organisations - including Nike, 20th Century Fox, Expedia, the Mormon Church, Alibaba and the National Rifle Association - were being displayed on Infowars' channels on the video sharing platform, according to CNN.
Many of the brands said they were not aware of what was going on and would cancel their ads on the channel after CNN contacted them.
Ad campaigns from YouTube don’t necessarily permit firms to know where their commercials will show up but do allow organisations to use exclusion filters to keep their ads from appearing on certain channels.
Several of the firms CNN contacted said they are taking extra measures to make sure their ads do not show up on such content again.
Alex Jones, who has been dubbed America’s leading conspiracy theorist and a prominent voice of the so-called “alt-right” movement in the US, is the founder of InfoWars.
YouTube reprimanded the far right site which is known for its false and outlandish conspiracy theories earlier this week after it posted a video claiming the student activists from the Florida high school shooting last month that left 17 dead were actors.
InfoWars' biggest YouTube account, The Alex Jones Channel, received one strike from the video-sharing site for the video.
On Saturday Jones claimed YouTube was going to delete the channel and all of the videos posted to it.
“The Alex Jones channel with billions of views is frozen. We have been told it will be deleted tomorrow and all 33 thousand videos will be erased. We just set up this new page subscribe if you want to see what the SPLC wants censored,” Jones wrote on Twitter, using an acronym for the Southern Poverty Law Centre, a legal advocacy organisation which monitors hate groups.
But YouTube told CBS News it is not planning on taking down Jones' YouTube channel in spite of his statement. YouTube said some advertisers had asked to be removed from running ads from Jones' channels and YouTube had informed him of that.
The platform said Jones’ description bears no relation to how the termination process works. YouTube’s community guidelines stipulate the account will be shut down altogether if it gets three strikes in the space of three months and it also has an appeals process.
Jones, whose channel has received over a billion views and 2.2 million subscribers, is famed for propagating far-fetched and erroneous conspiracy theories.
He suggested the Sandy Hook school shooting of 20 young children was staged, that the September 11 attacks of 2001 were an inside job and that the baseless reports about Hillary Clinton being part of a Washington pizzeria child sex abuse ring warrant serious investigation.
He has also claimed the US government puts chemicals into the water supply to turn people gay so they do not have children.
The Independent contacted a representative of YouTube for comment.
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