Image Credit: Infowars.com 
Elon Musk supposedly aimed to restore free speech when he acquired Twitter, however, his recent insistence he won’t reinstate Infowars founder Alex Jones begs the question why he was banned in the first place.
Background into Infowars Big Tech De-platforming
After Jones was already public enemy number one for helping Trump defeat Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, Infowars got under Dem lawmakers’ skin in November 2017 when it landed a trending link on Twitter with a story about New York City Mayor Mike De Blasio (D) ignoring warnings about incoming attacks after an ISIS militant killed eight people on a bike trail in Lower Manhattan.
Watch – Alex Jones Responds To Elon Musk’s Declaration Of War / Apparent Threat
At the time, Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) demanded to know what Twitter planned to do to stop Infowars articles from going viral and “spreading misinformation.” Twitter General Counsel Sean Edgett responded, “That’s something we’re thinking about all the time,” and, “It’s a bad user experience. And we don’t want to be known as a platform for that.”
Fast-forward to July 2018, and CNN reporter Oliver Darcy argued to Facebook execs that providing Infowars a platform went against their “commitment to fighting fake news and misinformation.”
Days later, Democrat Congressman Ted Deutch (D-Fla.) during a House Judiciary Committee inquiry pressured Facebook to ban Infowars.
On August 5, 2018 – in the run-up to the midterms – Apple removed several Jones podcasts before entirely removing The Alex Jones Show altogether citing “hate speech” violations. (The following month Apple also removed the Infowars app from its App Store despite surging popularity.)
The next day Facebook, Spotify and YouTube followed suit and permanently banned Infowars, prompting an avalanche of removals from numerous other platforms.
Twitter Resisted Banning Infowars (for a short while)
In the face of the bans, Twitter stood as the sole social media giant that resisted and dared platform Jones, with CEO Jack Dorsey having to issue tweets defending the company’s reasoning.
“We’re going to hold Jones to the same standard we hold to every account, not taking one-off actions to make us feel good in the short term, and adding fuel to new conspiracy theories,” Dorsey said.
“If we succumb and simply react to outside pressure, rather than straightforward principles we enforce (and evolve) impartially regardless of political viewpoints, we become a service that’s constructed by our personal views that can swing in any direction. That’s not us.”
After Dorsey’s defense of Jones remaining on the platform, the strikes quickly started coming and the following month Twitter banned Jones.
The 3 Strikes That Took Down Alex Jones
A week after Dorsey’s justification, Twitter put Jones and Infowars in a “time-out,” suspending their accounts for a week, with a Twitter rep telling CNBC, “I can confirm that a tweet was reported to us which contained a link to a video on [Twitter live video streaming service] Periscope. Upon review we determined it violated our rules and required the account to delete the tweet and video.”
Twitter attorney Vijaya Gadde told the Joe Rogan podcast that strike pertained to reported “child abuse,” concerning a viral video Infowars aired on a broadcast of a child bully being shoved to the ground by an adult. Jones had nothing to do with the video and merely commented on it.
Shortly thereafter, Alex Jones and Infowars were issued another strike for “inciting violence” after a video warning to President Donald Trump ironically enough to stop web censorship, in which Jones briefly commented Americans should have their “battle rifles ready at their bedsides” as radical left-wing Antifa militants were launching attacks on Americans and heading into the suburbs.
Infowars’ third and final Twitter strike came in September 2018 when Jones headed to Washington DC and confronted CNN reporter Oliver Darcy on Capitol Hill where Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was testifying to Congress.
The following day, Twitter banned Infowars citing “new reports of Tweets and videos posted yesterday that violate our abusive behavior policy,” and claimed Jones violated a policy prohibiting “excessively aggressive insults that target an individual, including content that contains slurs or similar language.”
Gadde recounted some of Jones’ comments to Darcy in her interview with Rogan and journalist Tim Pool.
“So the third strike that we looked at was a verbal altercation that Alex got into with a journalist… ‘You’re a virus to America and freedom,’ ‘smelling like a possum that climbed out of the rear end of a dead cow,’ ‘You look like a possum that got caught doing some really, really nasty stuff, in my view.’”
“That’s enough? Really?” Rogan questioned Gadde, adding, “That’s hilarious.”
Jones’ Twitter Ban Had Nothing to Do With Sandy Hook
Now, as Elon Musk has begun reinstating banned accounts, his justification for not restoring Jones is he’s offended by controversial things Jones said about Sandy Hook.
However, Jones’ initial banning had nothing to do with Sandy Hook. He was never found guilty in a court of law for defamation. And de-platforming efforts have only served to silence him from pushing back against media misrepresentations of what he said.
Meanwhile, as noted by political commentator Ali Alexander, Twitter may itself be guilty of using the Sandy Hook children’s deaths for gain as they never suspended ads on Sandy Hook hashtags or trends.
Additionally, as Ali notes, many of the conspiracy theories initially spread about Sandy Hook originated on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, after which Infowars reported on the bizarre anomalies the people discussing.
It’s also unclear how Musk’s “no mercy” rule squares with the many politicians who’ve launched endless wars in foreign countries where countless children have perished, or pharmaceutical companies responsible for negligible deaths.
Musk’s excuse for not bringing back Jones doesn’t hold up when the history behind his initial banning is laid bare.
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