As someone said in a tweet the other day, don’t make us defend Alex Jones. We don’t pay attention to Alex Jones, we rarely post about him (unless we’re ridiculing him for appearing shirtless on horseback or something), and we don’t consider him a conservative by any stretch.

But is it just us or is there some activist journalism going on over at CNN with the singular goal of purging Alex Jones and Infowars — and only Alex Jones and Infowars — from online existence? CNN first caught our eye with this:

As everyone on Twitter knows, there are plenty of people skirting the rules on these tech platforms — look at Dana Loesch’s mentions for one day if you want to see continual threats of violence.

But as Twitchy reported earlier today, it seemed that CNN was really pressuring Twitter — the sole tech holdout — to ban Jones by going through his timeline and pointing of instances of rule-breaking — and taking some glee in it. CNN was literally policing Twitter.

On Thursday evening, freelance journalist Nick Monroe took at closer look at CNN writer and producer Paul P. Murphy, who’s written a bunch of stories on Infowars for CNN. Sure, it’s easy to feel moral outrage at the Sandy Hook conspiracies Jones has been peddling, but is that what’s driving all this?

Yeah, see, this is where it gets weird. CNN was monitoring which companies’ ads were running on the Infowars’ YouTube Channel, getting in contact with them, and reporting on which ones had their ads removed. That the kind of stuff Sleeping Giants does.

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Here’s the highlighted bit: “Many of the brands — including Nike, Moen, Expedia, Acer, ClassPass, Honey, Alibaba and OneFamily — have suspended ads on InfoWars’ channels after being contacted by CNN for comment.”

Sure, this isn’t unusual territory for the investigative reporter at your local news affiliate, but it seems odd for CNN to take such an activist role in de-platforming an online entity.

As we reported too, CNN was not happy to learn that the Infowars app was still available on Apple’s and Google’s stores:

It’s like we said earlier: we’re not really comfortable having someone other than Twitter police content on Twitter (they do a bad enough job), and we really don’t want CNN stepping into the role. Is this something CNN is going to be doing for other objectionable sites? Or is Jones’ scalp all they want?

Who knows? But Alex Jones is a really easy target to start with if de-platforming online personalities is going to become a thing. If they’re taking requests, though, we know of some celebrity 9/11 truthers and anti-vaxxers who could go. See how easy it is to pick who you’d like to see vanish?

Maybe Brian Stelter will explain all of this this weekend on “Reliable Sources?”

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Tags: advertisersAlex JonesCNNde-platformingInfowarsNick MonroePaul Murphyyoutube