136 Citizens
$10 million a year from his media empire, largely through sales of
body building and health supplements, having grown from a reported
$1.5 million turnover in 2009.
43
By 2017, Seth Brown believed that
Jones had moved beyond the typical sources of revenue for a talkshow host – advertising and syndication fees – in order to transform
Infowars into a constant infomercial for his range of dietary supplements.
44
Again, figures (such as Brown’s $25 million) are entirely hypothetical, but it is clear that the 1.6 billion views on YouTube alone
would be worth a great deal to Jones in terms of driving an audience
to his own products on InfowarsStore.com. Indeed, the small scale of
Jones’s production efforts enabled him to take advantage of the new
conditions that had disrupted a century or more of traditional media
financing and which were explored in Chapter 2: while a large number of views certainly provided him with advertising revenue, he had
found a way to leverage a huge social media presence for e-commerce.
This boon for Jones, however, also proved its Achilles’ heel: for previous generations, the distribution of Infowars via cable or print would
have both been more limited to begin, but at the same time such a
channel would also have been less vulnerable to a takedown by the major tech giants The reaction by Jones was, unsurprisingly, vociferous
if also (equally unsurprisingly to anyone who had followed the site for
any length of time) tangential: as well as immediately accusing the tech
companies of engaging in censorship to promote their liberal interests,
Jones repeatedly claimed that the real reason for the ban was due to
“Chinese communist infiltration of Silicon Valley” and of the Democratic party.
45
When Twitter issued a temporary ban ten days later,
the President weighed in, accusing social media platforms of “totally
discriminating” against conservatives and engaging in “very dangerous” censorship.
46
The sense of aggrievement over this sense of innate
bias only increased when sites such as Breitbart began to report that
executives at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, had expressed dismay over Trump’s election.
47
Over the ensuing weeks, Jones appeared
to unravel further: after confronting Dorsey in September about alleged shadow banning of conservatives (the practice of downgrading
or removing such accounts from searches) after the Twitter CEO had
attended a meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jones was
banned from the site permanently (he had also confronted Senator
Marco Rubio and CNN’s Oliver Darcy). By the end of the month, PayPal banned Infowars from its services and with apps finally removed
from Apple the site was effectively locked out of the majority of distribution channels for reaching a huge audience. As Higgins observed, as
with so many other aspects of conservative politics, elements such as
Infowars which had existed on the fringes of opinion and which had
appeared to be ready to enter the mainstream following the election
of President Trump were placed in jeopardy precisely because of that
$10 million a year from his media empire, largely through sales of
body building and health supplements, having grown from a reported
$1.5 million turnover in 2009.
43
By 2017, Seth Brown believed that
Jones had moved beyond the typical sources of revenue for a talkshow host – advertising and syndication fees – in order to transform
Infowars into a constant infomercial for his range of dietary supplements.
44
Again, figures (such as Brown’s $25 million) are entirely hypothetical, but it is clear that the 1.6 billion views on YouTube alone
would be worth a great deal to Jones in terms of driving an audience
to his own products on InfowarsStore.com. Indeed, the small scale of
Jones’s production efforts enabled him to take advantage of the new
conditions that had disrupted a century or more of traditional media
financing and which were explored in Chapter 2: while a large number of views certainly provided him with advertising revenue, he had
found a way to leverage a huge social media presence for e-commerce.
This boon for Jones, however, also proved its Achilles’ heel: for previous generations, the distribution of Infowars via cable or print would
have both been more limited to begin, but at the same time such a
channel would also have been less vulnerable to a takedown by the major tech giants The reaction by Jones was, unsurprisingly, vociferous
if also (equally unsurprisingly to anyone who had followed the site for
any length of time) tangential: as well as immediately accusing the tech
companies of engaging in censorship to promote their liberal interests,
Jones repeatedly claimed that the real reason for the ban was due to
“Chinese communist infiltration of Silicon Valley” and of the Democratic party.
45
When Twitter issued a temporary ban ten days later,
the President weighed in, accusing social media platforms of “totally
discriminating” against conservatives and engaging in “very dangerous” censorship.
46
The sense of aggrievement over this sense of innate
bias only increased when sites such as Breitbart began to report that
executives at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, had expressed dismay over Trump’s election.
47
Over the ensuing weeks, Jones appeared
to unravel further: after confronting Dorsey in September about alleged shadow banning of conservatives (the practice of downgrading
or removing such accounts from searches) after the Twitter CEO had
attended a meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jones was
banned from the site permanently (he had also confronted Senator
Marco Rubio and CNN’s Oliver Darcy). By the end of the month, PayPal banned Infowars from its services and with apps finally removed
from Apple the site was effectively locked out of the majority of distribution channels for reaching a huge audience. As Higgins observed, as
with so many other aspects of conservative politics, elements such as
Infowars which had existed on the fringes of opinion and which had
appeared to be ready to enter the mainstream following the election
of President Trump were placed in jeopardy precisely because of that