Elon Musk has reversed his stance and allowed conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to reactivate their account on the platform X, formerly known as Twitter. This is despite Jones being banned on the site in 2018 due to a lawsuit concerning the propagation of dubious theories concerning the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Despite earlier promising not to permit Jones' return, Musk has now backtracked on his declaration.
Elon Musk has reinstated the account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on X, which was formerly known as Twitter, disregarding a year-old promise to keep Jones away from the social media platform. Jones had previously been banned from Twitter in 2018 due to violations of the company's "abusive behavior policy." Notably, he was facing a defamation lawsuit at the time for propagating the false narrative that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was staged. It is especially noteworthy that Musks' decision to bring Jones back to X falls within the anniversary week of the tragedy.
Though 20 children and six educators were killed in Newtown, Connecticut, Jones routinely stated on his show, Infowars, that the shooting never actually occurred, but was a hoax to implementation stricter gun control legislation. Therefore, the Infowars account is still banned from X as of Sunday morning. Those who believed Jones' conspiracies proceeded to harass and threaten the affected family members, and in some cases, even physically confronting and accusing bereaved parents of being 'crisis actors' whose children had never even existed, according to reports by Associated Press. Sandy Hook victims' relatives sued Jones in civil court in Texas and Connecticut, and were granted a nearly $1.5 billion award as a result. In spite of this, Jones was unable to obtain any personal bankruptcy protection to try to avoid paying more than $1 billion of the judgment.
X users anticipated that Jones would be brought back since Thursday, when Elon Musk mentioned that he was considering the reinstatement. He went on to declare that, as the platform "aspires to be the global town square," permanent bans should be a rare occurrence. On Sunday, a poll was posted on X which gained nearly 2 million votes, with more than half of the results favoring the reinstatement. Elon Musk himself then confirmed this decision, and stated that Jones "cannot break the law," and that if he were to spread misinformation, X's community notes feature would then be used to correct him.
As soon as Jones was restored to the platform, his first activity was to repost a message from Andrew Tate— an influencer who has been charged with rape and human trafficking— welcoming him back. While Musk has been recognized as a proponent of free speech, he has taken advantage of his control of X to suspend the accounts of those he viewed as enemies and vocal opponents. For example, X also suspended the accounts of software developer Travis Brown, a same-day private jet tracker account built by Jack Sweeney, and Aaron Greenspan, the founder of legal and public records database Plainsite.
Musk has been significantly criticized regarding the changes he has made on X since taking over in October 2022, including the widespread reversal of account suspensions, such as of Donald Trump. In addition, after he posted what the White House labelled as "antisemitic and racist hate," a number of major advertisers suspended their campaigns on X. In reaction to this, Musk contemptuously declared that they should "go f**k themselves," and "don't advertise," when he was on the stage of the 2023 DealBook Summit in New York.
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