Twitter Finally Admits Alex Jones Violated Their Rules and Still Won't Do Anything About It
It's hard to watch Alex Jones get booted off one social media platform after another and not feel at least a glimmer of glee. But while companies like Apple, YouTube, and Facebook have plugged the plug on Jones and his InfoWars show, one major player, Twitter, has maintained the frustrating position that not only has Jones not violated their terms of service, but it's important to entertain all perspectives on a conversation, even if that conversation is "all the parents of kids murdered at Sandy Hook are liars."
But while Twitter may have its own reasons for not wanting Jones banned, it turns out their claims that he hasn't broken their rules isn't accurate. On Thursday, CNN reported that Twitter's vice president for "trust and safety" emailed employees explaining that if Jones had put on Twitter the same content that led to him being banned from YouTube, then Twitter would have taken similar action. CNN included in the story more than a dozen tweets from Jones and InfoWars that were similar to the cited YouTube content, like accusing Parkland student David Hogg of being a Nazi and claiming that same-sex marriage would "pave the way for pedophile rights."
On Friday, a Twitter spokesperson conceded that seven of the tweets in CNN's report count as violations of the company's terms of service, but the tweets were deleted quickly after the story came out. On Jones' Friday program he admitted that he told his staff to delete them to "take the super high road," but maintained that he had broken no rules and did nothing wrong. Per CNN:
Among the seven tweets found to have violated Twitter's rules, the spokesperson said, two of the tweets occurred recently enough that Twitter could cite them in the future to take additional punitive action against Jones' accounts.
The other five tweets occurred before a set of bolstered Twitter rules were put into place in December 2017. While Twitter required those tweets be deleted, the company cannot use them as grounds to take further action against the accounts, the spokesperson said.
The Twitter spokesperson was not immediately able to provide CNN with the specific tweets the company had determined to have violated its rules.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has explained that he believes it's up to journalists to police Twitter for harmful content, which seems like a deeply unsatisfying abdication of the company's responsibility for its own platform. But to claim that Jones is in the clear when it's so easily provable that he's not makes it very hard to take Twitter at their word when they claim they care enough to take this seriously.
