Repellent conspiracy theorist and Infowars founder Alex Jones isn’t having the best time of late.
- He’s had videos and pages removed from Facebook for violating the firm’s hate speech policies and “glorifying violence.”
- He’s had his podcasts unlisted from the iTunes store and the Apple Podcasts app for violating Apple’s “hate speech” policies.
- He’s had his YouTube channel terminated for violating the site’s “hate speech and harrassment” policies.
- He’s had his shows removed from Spotify’s podcast library due to “repeated violations of Spotify’s prohibited content policies.”
- He’s had his accounts with newsletter service MailChimp terminated for “hateful conduct”.
- The Pinterest page for InfoWars has been removed.
- His videos have even been banned from umm… YouPorn.
There’s an obvious social media giant missing from the list: Twitter.
Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey attempted to explain the site’s refusal to take action against InfoWars and Alex Jones, having previously committed the site to helping “increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation.”
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
It’s the same content that Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, and Apple banned. But Twitter isn’t doing anything.
Despite Twitter’s lack of action, it’s clearly been a pretty bad month for Alex Jones and InfoWars.
But it’s nothing compared to the horror that parents of the children shot dead at Sandy Hook Elementary School have been living every day for the last five years.
As the New York Times reports, some families have been forced to move multiple times because of harassment and threats from those who believe Jones’s sick conspiracy theories.
In the five years since Noah Pozner was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., death threats and online harassment have forced his parents, Veronique De La Rosa and Leonard Pozner, to relocate seven times. They now live in a high-security community hundreds of miles from where their 6-year-old is buried.
“I would love to go see my son’s grave and I don’t get to do that, but we made the right decision,” Ms. De La Rosa said in a recent interview. Each time they have moved, online fabulists stalking the family have published their whereabouts.
It’s understandable that many Twitter users feel the site is failing to do what’s right.
I’m outta here. I can’t be part of a platform that protects someone who attacks the parents of murdered kids. Fuck this.
We need to do better.
— Mike Monteiro🌹 (@monteiro) August 8, 2018
