X restores Alex Jones

Five years after Big Tech deplatformed him, Jones is back — but X ain’t what it used to be

Dec 12, 2023

(Jaap Arriens / Getty Images)

On Sunday, Elon Musk restored the notorious right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to X. The move followed a poll he posted for his followers, in which a large majority of respondents appeared to vote in favor of bringing Jones back.

Like many of Musk’s decisions, this one appeared to have arrived on a whim, after someone tagged him in a post asking him to consider the idea. If the move was shocking, it was largely because Musk had previously ruled out the idea in the name of his firstborn child, who died tragically.

By now there’s no sense working up much outrage over which right-wing extremists Musk welcomes back onto X. It has now been more than a year since X’s CEO declared a “general amnesty” for accounts that had previously been banned, resulting in the restoration of various white nationalists, QAnon affiliates, and others who had been booted from Twitter for good reason under the previous regime. At this point he could announce the returns of Cobra Commander, Skeletor, and Voldemort, and few of us would blink an eye.

But Jones’ original deplatforming five years ago stands as one of the most consequential cases of collective action among tech platforms in modern history. It’s now been long enough that some readers have asked me, in good faith, whether Jones’ case should come up for appeal.

“What’s the case for indefinite bans on social media?” one reader asked me over on Threads. “In a world where big platforms are winner-take-all markets, handing out perma bans should be the absolute last resort and only be applied with very clear guidelines.”

It’s a good question. To answer it in the Jones case, let’s refresh our memory about the events leading up to his removal from Twitter and other platforms in the late summer of 2018.

That year, the national media was nearing the peak of its interest in the platforms’ role in spreading misinformation. Jones, who advanced all manner of outlandish theories across his Infowars media empire, had effectively harnessed platform recommendation algorithms to grow his audience and revenue.

Some of those theories were harmlessly nutty, such as his famous rant warning that chemicals were being put in the water to “turn frogs gay.” But he also promoted much more dangerous theories, in particular the idea that mass shootings were staged as a pretext for the US government seizing citizens’ guns. Jones’ followers tormented families of the Sandy Hook school shooting online and off; one family moved 12 times in an effort to escape the death threats and harassment. Last year, a judge ruled that Jones must pay nearly $1.5 billion for defaming eight of the shooting victims’ families. Jones then took his company into bankruptcy, in what families called an improper effort to avoid paying.

While the harassment of Sandy Hook victims is at the center of the Jones story, it is only one aspect of his deplatforming.

Over the course of 2018, there was a steady drip of stories about Jones crossing various platform lines. That February, he received a strike on his YouTube channel for saying that survivors of the Parkland school shooting were crisis actors.

He got another strike in July, with four violations. He posted two videos that contained hate speech against Muslims, and a third that attacked transgender people, I reported at the time. A fourth violated a rule against child endangerment; it had shown an adult man pushing a child to the ground under the headline “How to prevent liberalism.”

That same month, Jones stirred another controversy during a broadcast streamed on Facebook in which he accused special counsel Robert Mueller, baselessly, of child rape. Facebook suspended him for 30 days.

As Jones’ provocations piled up, platforms faced increasing pressure to take more decisive action. In the end — quite unusually — it was Apple that acted first, removing his podcasts from its app and iTunes store on hate-speech grounds. Facebook quickly followed, removing his pages for hate speech reasons. So did YouTube, which deleted his channel.

In all cases, the reason for deplatforming Jones was not “he lied about Sandy Hook.” It was that he kept saying awful things about Muslims, transgender people, and other minorities.

After most of the platforms arrived at the decision to get rid of Jones, there was one prominent holdout: Twitter. The company offered various reasons for its inaction; in one case, then-CEO Jack Dorsey suggested that it should be up to journalists to fact-check Jones’ claims on the platform in real time. (Musk offered an echo of this when he restored Jones, saying Community Notes would check his worst impulses.) But Jones’ edgelord behavior continued, and eventually Twitter capitulated and booted him off in September.

All of which brings us back to the question: what’s the case for perma-bans on social media?

Most people who lose their accounts forever have a far shorter rap sheet than Jones. Many of them legitimately were unaware that they were breaking whatever rule got them axed, and could likely become better citizens of the platform if given a second chance. For that reason, I favor medium- and long-term suspensions over permanent bans in most cases. (Discord is doing interesting work here, as I wrote about here in October.)

Staring down the barrel of financial ruin, Jones eventually did bring himself to admit that the Sandy Hook shootings were real. He also offered a tepid apology to victims’ families, though he also quickly said he was “done apologizing.”

Meanwhile, to my knowledge, he has never apologized for the hate speech that was the real reason most platforms ultimately got rid of him. And in an appearance with Musk on Twitter Spaces yesterday, Jones implied the CIA had sponsored the legal case against him — offering a fresh reason to his remaining followers to harass the families of Sandy Hook victims, if they wanted one.

It is difficult for me to look at this set of facts and conclude that Jones is a changed man, deserving of a second chance at harnessing platforms’ recommendation algorithms to grow and monetize his following.

Musk, though, has given him that chance anyway. What does it mean for X, and the media ecosystem in general?

For X, which is in the middle of its most consequential exodus of advertisers to date, the return of Jones — and his friendly appearances on Spaces with Musk and accused rapist and human trafficker Andrew Tate — will likely only accelerate the endgame. At this point it appears that Musk would rather accept the pyrrhic victory of bankrupting his platform in the name of “free speech” than taking even the minimum steps necessary to build a viable advertising business. (And if you’re wondering what kind of advertisers are clambering to show up in between Tate and Jones in the feed, 404 Media offers a memorable example.)

For the media ecosystem overall, though, I suspect the damage will be far more contained. The threat Jones posed in 2018 came from the fact that he had access to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and various podcasting platforms at the same time, all of which helped him to find new audience members and revenue. They also served to amplify his ideas on Twitter in particular, which then served as a kind of collective assignment editor for much of the national media.

Had those basic dynamics remained, Jones’ return would be a cause for concern. But he still has no access to Meta’s platforms or YouTube. And while a small, shameless remnant of the press corps continues to post on X as if nothing has changed, it now rarely if ever serves as an assignment editor the way it did in the past. (One admitted exception to this was the OpenAI CEO drama, in which X served as a kind of public negotiating platform for the relevant players. Aside from that, though, I can’t tell you the last time I felt compelled to check X to follow tech news or discussions.)

Jones’ return to X will surely bring with it the usual provocations; who knows which fictional chemicals will be turning which animals gay in 2024. But on the X of today there are far fewer people available to be provoked; fewer reporters to engage with and amplify his abuse; fewer advertisers to fund the infrastructure he now hopes to rely on.

The more relevant conversations are now elsewhere, and whatever Musk may be doing on X, Jones will not be a part of them.

Talk about this edition with us in Discord: This link will get you in for the next week.

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Send us tips, comments, questions, and other supervillains that should come back to X: casey@platformer.news and zoe@platformer.news.

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Darren

Musk is intentionally trying to destroy Twitter. It's the only explanation.

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pandaexplosion

am i right in thinking that google wouldn't have needed to make deals to suppress rival app stores if, like apple, they controlled the whole stack: phone hardware, phone os, app development language, and the app store? it feels like this is going to result in google learning bad lessons if we're letting apple off the hook here while penalizing google for being less good at being a monopoly

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X restores Alex Jones

Five years after Big Tech deplatformed him, Jones is back — but X ain’t what it used to be

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Those good posts

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