After weeks of controversy surrounding the presence of Alex Jones and his conspiracy website InfoWars on major online platforms, Apple was the first major tech company to pull the trigger on the site’s controversial content. On Sunday, it took down five of six InfoWars podcasts from its iTunes and Podcast apps. Other tech companies, including Facebook and YouTube, followed suit with bans, citing their policies against hate speech.
But InfoWars, whose reach has been severely limited by these moves, still has a prominent platform with Apple: the InfoWars app is today (Aug. 7) ranked fourth among all free news apps on the company’s App Store. On Monday (Aug. 6), it was ranked 37th.
This doesn’t mean it’s the fourth-most downloaded news app, since the App Store’s algorithm takes other factors into account, but it does give InfoWars a significant boost. Visibility is key to success on the App store—the higher the app is ranked, the more people get to see it.
Apple doesn’t release download numbers for apps, but app-tracking firm Apptopia told Quartz that it estimates that 2,294 people downloaded the app yesterday, so not a huge number. It has more than 95,000 downloads since its launch in mid-July. The firm uses a combination of data it gets from 250,000 apps, the app store ranking, and other publicly-available data to create its estimates.
The app is also available on Google Play’s app store.