Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has had his account on X - formerly Twitter - reinstated by Elon Musk.
Musk asked users to vote in a poll whether or not to lift a Jones ban pre-dating his ownership of the platform, signalling he would honour the result.
Around 70% of roughly two million respondents voted to lift the ban.
Jones is most notorious for falsely claiming the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, in which 20 children and six adults died, was “staged”.
He was ordered to pay $1.5bn (£1.32bn) in damages to family members of the victims, after courts found he had caused them to be subjected to harassment and death threats with his false claims.
I see we’re still reporting on X as if it retained any kind of importance or significance. Quaint.
I appreciate the heads up that we’re going to be hearing from Alex Jones again soon, regardless of who, exactly, has chosen to platform him again. This is awful. He’s a hateful, horrible person, and I don’t look forward to the conspiracy theories he’s going to create again.
Thank you. Tired of hearing about this clown, as if doing alt-right shit is novel. It’s only newsworthy when he does something progressive by accident.
Musk has a great deal of control over:
His choices impact world events whether you “hear about this clown” or not. Ignoring him doesn’t change that.
Okay, but “asshole let’s asshole onto his platform of assholes” isn’t any of those things, nor is it somehow surprising and novel and therefore worthy of the bytes needed to convey this “news.”
ETA: What is the purpose of an article like this? It’s certainly not to convince people like us, so it must be either for people who don’t stick Elon in the “malignant asshole” category by default, and/or it’s ragebait.
If someone in the former category thinks Alex Jones being let back on is the last straw and not the litany of other transgressions, then they and these authors deserve each other.
It’s for us who listen to Knowledge Fight to get a preview of what’s coming up.
Hello, fellow Wonk.