“The more I’m persecuted, the stronger I get,” Jones said on his live internet broadcast three days later. “It backfired.”

In the three weeks before the Aug. 6 bans, Infowars had a daily average of nearly 1.4 million visits to its website and views of videos posted by its main YouTube and Facebook pages, according to a New York Times analysis of data from the web data firms Tubular Labs and SimilarWeb. In the three weeks afterward, its audience fell by roughly half, to about 715,000 site visits and video views, according to the analysis.

The analysis did not include traffic to the 2-month-old Infowars app or views of videos that Jones posted on Twitter, where his accounts remain active. He also still shares posts inside private Facebook groups, and his followers repost his content from their social-media accounts. But data suggest that those sources of traffic are smaller than Jones’ main Facebook and YouTube pages.

That Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube, muffled one of the internet’s loudest voices so quickly illustrates the tremendous influence a few internet companies have over public discourse and the spread of information.

Infowars’ fate is likely to be a point of debate in congressional hearings Wednesday with tech executives including Twitter’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, and Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg. Part of the focus will be on claims by President Donald Trump and other critics that Silicon Valley is silencing conservative voices.

The case of Jones and Infowars is tricky for many politicians and figures on the right. While many dislike the idea of tech companies censoring political speech, and Infowars leans far right, Jones regularly spreads lies, conspiracy theories and inflammatory attacks against political enemies. (On Thursday, a Texas judge denied his motion to dismiss a defamation lawsuit by parents of children killed six years ago in the Sandy Hook school shooting, which he has falsely called a hoax.)

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, tweeted in August: “Am no fan of Jones — among other things he has a habit of repeatedly slandering my Dad by falsely and absurdly accusing him of killing JFK — but who the hell made Facebook the arbiter of political speech?”

Now that access to Infowars is mainly through its website or app, Jones’ ability to reach new viewers is severely limited because they will no longer come across his videos while scrolling through Facebook or YouTube, said Monica Stephens, a geography professor at the University at Buffalo who has studied the spread of misinformation online.

“This increases the likelihood Infowars is preaching to a filter bubble versus reaching new audiences,” she said.

Another right-wing provocateur might present a cautionary tale for Jones: Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart editor who gained notoriety during the 2016 presidential race for his abusive language. Twitter barred Yiannopoulos in 2016 for harassing the comedian Leslie Jones, and his public profile gradually faded.

Last month, Yiannopoulos lashed out at critics on Facebook, saying, “I have lost everything standing up for the truth in America, spent all my savings, destroyed all my friendships, and ruined my whole life.”

In an email, he wrote, “Social justice warriors machinate to get speakers canceled, and social networks purge conservatives, for the same reason: no-platforming works.”

Neither Alex Jones nor Infowars responded to requests for comment.

Jones has long relied on Silicon Valley to distribute his message. His YouTube channel amassed 2.4 million subscribers and more than 1.6 billion views of nearly 36,000 videos it had posted since 2008, according to Social Blade, which tracks social media data. His success was due partly to YouTube’s video-recommendation algorithm, which, in an effort to drive clicks, pushed many users to Jones’ clips.

The main Facebook pages for Jones and Infowars, meanwhile, had drawn 668 million views of their videos over the past three years, according to Tubular Labs.

But Aug. 6, Facebook deleted four pages run by Jones or Infowars for breaking its rules, including by “glorifying violence” and “using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants.”

YouTube erased Jones’ channel for flouting a penalty for a previous punishment for hate speech. YouTube also quietly deleted more than a dozen other channels associated with Infowars for trying to circumvent its rules.

Since then, Jones has made the companies a central theme of his near-daily show. In recent shows broadcast on his website, he has falsely accused YouTube and Facebook of being controlled by the Chinese government and assisting in an elaborate global conspiracy to control the world’s population.

“It is a panopticonic, total internet-of-things-integration, global-social-score, complete command-and-control system,” Jones said three days after the ban. “It is the virtual-reality, AI weapon system now attacking the United States with traitors inside the major security agencies blocking Trump’s resistance of the program.”

He added, “I have been chosen for destruction because I brought you this information.”

Jones also directly appealed to Trump, asking him to intervene. (Trump appeared on Jones’ show during the 2016 presidential campaign, telling him: “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.”)

Eleven days after Jones began calling on Trump to weigh in, the president tweeted: “Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices. Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen.”

Trump has since accelerated his criticism of Silicon Valley and how it surfaces information, alleging that Google doctored search results for his name. Google has denied the claim.

For a brief period after the bans, Jones enjoyed a bump in publicity. Traffic to Infowars.com soared 67 percent to about 777,000 visits a day in the two weeks after the ban, compared with the previous two weeks, SimilarWeb said. Downloads of the Infowars app surged sixfold to 25,500 downloads a day over the same period, according to Apptopia, which tracks app data.

But both figures have since fallen to nearly pre-ban levels. And the spike could not replace the lost traffic from Infowars’ top three Facebook and YouTube channels, which together averaged roughly 900,000 video views a day in the three weeks before the ban, according to Tubular Labs.

Other outlets have not helped much. Even as Jones’ account has remained on Twitter, his videos there attract 21,000 views on average, compared with 44,500 views per YouTube video, according to NeoReach, which helps brands market on social media. Infowars’ accounts on other sites, such as Dailymotion, Amazon’s Twitch and BitChute, a video site mostly for people barred from YouTube, garner views in the hundreds for videos — and often fewer.

NeoReach said an analysis of Jones’ followers on social media showed that most were white married men with an average age of 28 and average annual income of $46,500. NeoReach said his Twitter account “has a notable audience concentration in New York.”

Despite Jones’ early pronouncements that the bans would make his Infowars operation stronger, there are signs he is concerned.

On one recent show, he ranted without evidence that Silicon Valley companies gave liberals like the billionaire George Soros access to their users’ personal data, including “your film roll, what you did with your wife, your kids, you know, in the bathtub, Grandma.”

“It’s all theirs,” he shouted. “And everybody’s lining up to kiss these monsters’ disgusting satanic souls.”

Seconds later, the show went to a break, cutting to a recorded promotion in which Jones urged his followers to share Infowars’ videos on social media and to sign up for its newsletter “so there’s no way the censors can get between us.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Jack Nicas © 2018 The New York Times