Twitter will not ban InfoWars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, says Jack Dorsey

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has confirmed that the platform will not ban InfoWars and its founder Alex Jones , because they do not violate Twitter’s rules. Jones has accused social media platforms of unfair censorship of his accounts because a number of tech giants including YouTube and Facebook have **deleted the content** that he had shared. They were said to have propagated hate speech and popularly known for spreading unsubstantiated allegations about tragic events, including 9/11. [caption id=“attachment_4931251” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] Jack Dorsey confirms that Twitter will not ban Alex Jones. Image: Tech2[/caption] For instance, he has claimed on his radio show and on his website InfoWars that the Sandy Hook Elementary school attack was “completely fake” and a “giant hoax.” For those who do not know, the shooting occurred on 14 December 2012 in Connecticut, US, when a 20-year-old Adam Lanza fatally shot 20 children between six and seven years old, as well as six adult staff members. Lanza then shot himself dead. After calling this event hoax, Jones is now being sued for defamation by the parents of the children who were killed. Jack Dorsey confirmed in a tweet on 8 August that the company will not be removing him from the platform because he simply does not violate any of its rules, but it will do that if he ever does in fact violate.

We didn’t suspend Alex Jones or Infowars yesterday. We know that’s hard for many but the reason is simple: he hasn’t violated our rules. We’ll enforce if he does. And we’ll continue to promote a healthy conversational environment by ensuring tweets aren’t artificially amplified.

— jack (@jack) August 8, 2018

While there definitely must be a lot of pressure to ban him completely, Dorsey says that sticking to company policy is more important than trying to simply “succumb and simply react to outside pressure.” Even Apple announced  in a statement that the mobile app of US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’, Infowars Official, will continue to be available on its App Store because the application, in particular, had not violated any of the company’s guidelines. If you’re someone who doesn’t know what has Jones said and why is he being talked about, do go check out his twitter handle. This year in July, he said that Democrats planned to launch a civil war on 4 July or US Independence Day. Similarly, last year, he tweeted that Muslims in England were demanding that the Queen either convert to Islam or leave the country. He also said that “transgenderism” is a CIA “plan to depopulate humanity,” and back in 2013, he even went on to describe the then president Barack Obama as the “global head of al-Qaeda.” Now we can understand why the public could be unhappy that Jones is not being banned on Twitter. However, we also understand that the platform has its own policies and has hence taken this decision, even if Twitter may not have given us a clear explanation as to why. They are trying. Dorsey in his twitter thread goes on to say that the “truth is we’ve been terrible at explaining our decisions in the past. We’re fixing that.”