Alex Jones Is Back on X, But It’s a ‘Sinking Ship’ With a Muted Reach, Say Media Experts

The return of Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to X this week was either the final bell tolling on a dying platform for rational discourse, or just the latest sign that Elon Musk is determined to sink his asset into the morass of unfettered speech and hatemongers.

Is it the end of X? Or simply a new identity for the platform, home to refugees from the mainstream media?

“It’s just part of the trajectory that he’s taking the company on,” Nandini Jammi, an activist who worked to get the Infowars founder banned from several platforms, said of Musk. “For the last few months, he’s been inviting neo-Nazis back onto the platform, along with various other conspiracy theorists.”

Numerous people still clinging to the platform declared — yet again — that this was their last straw. And yet it’s also undeniable that the conversation among Musk, Jones, media personality and accused rapist Andrew Tate and 2024 GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy attracted 110,000 live viewers during a Spaces discussion on Sunday — about one-third of the audience CNN drew — 374,000 total viewers — for the same hour the Sunday before.

That kind of audience could signal that Musk may be trying to create a new model for a tech-led media ecosystem that stands in opposition to legacy, mainstream media.

At the beginning of the nearly three-hour discussion, Jones told moderator Mario Nawfal that he’s given “over 100” apologies on shows over the years for promoting the lie that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax. “I just take calls, interview guests, and then I play devil’s advocate,” Jones said. “If that hurts people’s feelings I apologize. But I did not send people to your houses. I did not pee on graves.”

Even with more followers, however, Jones is not likely to do as much damage as he did five years ago, a number of media experts told TheWrap.

“Alex Jones’ reach will be muted due to the number of users fleeing the platform on a regular basis. On a per capita basis, X has fewer users that will be exposed to such content,” Julianna Kirschner, a lecturer at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, told TheWrap.

When Jones was permanently banned in September 2018 for “abusive behavior,” he had about 900,000 followers on Twitter, while his Infowars account, which was also banned, had about 430,000, AP reported at the time. As of this writing, Jones’ reinstated account (@RealAlexJones) follower count has doubled to 1.8 million, while Infowars (@infowars) has 406,300, nearly as many as before its ban.

Some high-profile users, including former NAACP lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill, said they were finally leaving the faltering social media platform for good.

But Jammi says Musk had already damaged the platform so badly that even without Jones, X is “a sinking ship.”

Kirschner echoed Jammi in saying that X no longer has the reach and influence Twitter used to. “Since X’s downward shift, no other platform has filled the void in any notable way,” Kirschner said. “Former Twitter/X users have scattered to other platforms. Jones’ users are more likely to be found on Telegram and/or Truth Social now, which cater to their viewpoints.”

Pinning down the exact number of Jones’ X followers is as tricky as getting a clear picture of his finances. According to Jones, who filed for bankruptcy following the $1.5 billion damages awarded to Sandy Hook families in July, he has less than $2 million. A forensic accountant’s testimony in an October 2022 defamation trial put his worth closer to between $135 million and $270 million

After Jones’ and Infowars’ initial ban in 2018, Twitter found and blocked 18 other accounts associated with him. He may well have additional accounts now that he’s back. Musk, who was clearly in favor of Jones’s return well before he polled X users about it, has been known to sign users up for things they never asked for, including unwelcome Blue Checks.

But it is X whose finances are really at issue. As of the end of October, X was internally valued at $19 billion, less than half of the $44 billion Musk paid for the platform one year before, according to a leaked employee equity compensation plan. Internal documents reviewed by The New York Times showed that X could potentially lose as much as $75 million in advertising revenue by the end of the year.

“What this advertising boycott is going to do, it’s going to kill the company,” Musk said at the DealBook Summit conference last month. “And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company, and we will document it in great detail.”

Musk hasn’t exactly been courting new users or advertisers, whom he collectively told “F— you” last month. “I feel like it’s [another] ‘f—k you’ to advertisers,” says Jammi. “I think he’s continuing to go down this misguided path of challenging them to leave, which they are gladly accepting.”

While many Fortune 500 brands have dumped Twitter, citing Musk’s antisemitic posts and other hate speech, some have returned since the last dust-up, including Netflix, as TheWrap reported on Thursday.

Ifill, the former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, also accepted the challenge to dump X. On Dec. 10, in a farewell thread, she wrote of Jones, “He has monstrously led a campaign of gaslighting and assault on the spirit of Sandy Hook families & desecrated the memory of those murdered children. He is a ghoul. His return to this site completes its utter degradation. We are in a war for the human soul.”

After Musk bought the platform in October of 2022 — when it was still called Twitter — one of the first things he did was welcome back several previously banned users, including Andrew Anglin, founder of the white supremacist website The Daily Stormer.

The Tesla founder also dismantled Twitter’s Trust and Safety Board and the company’s PR department, effectively making it almost impossible for users to report or ban hate speech.

X’s hate speech problem and disinformation isn’t unique, of course. Since the start of the Israel-Hamas conflict on Oct. 7, antisemitism and Islamophobia have risen exponentially across most social media platforms.

“If an institution is going to make a political statement and say that they’re getting off a platform because hate speech is on there, then they have to get on every platform,” said Julie Smith, the author of “Master the Media: How Teaching Media Literacy Can Save Our Plugged-In World” and a communications instructor at Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri.

“It may not get the same extent of the publicity that Twitter’s getting,” Smith said, “but there is that content on every single platform.”

TheWrap reached out to a media rep at X for comment, but they did not reply by presstime.

Natalie Korach contributed reporting for this story.

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