Major tech companies have begun to ban right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones from their services, reflecting a more aggressive enforcement of policies against hate speech and misinformation following protests on social media." — The Boston Globe, 8/6/18
Over the past few weeks there has been mounting public pressure for Apple, Facebook, Spotify, and Twitter to remove far-right personality Alex Jones from their platforms, on the grounds that Jones’s hateful and dishonest rhetoric violates the terms of services of these platforms. Finally, yesterday Apple, Facebook, and Spotify have removed Infowars for good. Here at Domino’s, we have also decided it’s time to stop giving Infowars a mouthpiece, and have decided to remove them from our Online Pizza Tracker.
We believe in free speech on our platform, as displayed by our broad range of themes for the Pizza Tracker — basketball, baseball, romance, and heavy metal. The Pizza Tracker is a place for discourse for people from all political stripes, where anyone can discuss ideas while they wait to see what their delivery driver’s name is.
Yet we must uphold our terms of service. Hate and pizza do not coexist at Domino’s — we’re not Papa John’s.
The Domino’s Pizza Tracker allows you to see when your pizza is being prepped, baked, boxed, and out for delivery. With the Infowars extension, you could see when your pizza is being radicalized — when it is doughy, white, and impressionable — and this, we now realize, has no place on our website.
Furthermore, we would like to apologize for our selection of white nationalist and conspiracy-themed pizzas, which included: White, Pepe-aroni, QAnonion, Deep State Dish, (Chemicals Are Turning The Frogs Into) Meat Lovers, and New York Style, which was a pizza that has descended into criminal anarchy under Democrats.
We will always encourage the free exchange of ideas. As George Orwell once said, “The Pizza Tracker is the last great bastion of human expression; to lose it would be to lose freedom itself.” This quote, like any quote that contains a semicolon, is one we believe wholeheartedly.
Not all websites need follow our lead — Twitter, for example, has remained steadfast in allowing Jones and Infowars free reign on their platform. But that makes sense: if you take away the neo-Nazis and lunatics, Twitter would just be eight journalists and three standup comedians from New York.
Finally, although we recognize that a number of right-wing pizza lovers will be disappointed in the removal of Infowars from the Domino’s website, don’t worry — we are in the process of creating a ‘Mainstream Republican Party’ theme, which is getting closer and closer to Infowars every day.