Twitter banned Infowars and its founder, the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, following months of public pressure to do so.
In a series of tweets on Thursday, the company said it had “permanently suspended” accounts associated with Jones and Infowars after numerous complaints that they violated its terms of service prohibiting repeated abusive behavior. A Twitter spokesperson told The Daily Beast specifically that an Infowars video posted on Twitter of Alex Jones berating CNN reporter Oliver Darcy on Wednesday was the final violation of the company’s terms.
“Those are the eyes of a rat,” Jones told Darcy to his face in a live video, where he accused Darcy and CNN of trying police internet content.
“Today, we permanently suspended @realalexjones and @infowars from Twitter and Periscope,” Twitter said in the first of a series of Thursday tweets. “We took this action based on new reports of Tweets and videos posted yesterday that violate our abusive behavior policy, in addition to the accounts’ previous violations,” the company tweeted, linking to its policies on abusive behavior.”“As we continue to increase transparency around our Rules and enforcement actions, we wanted to be open about this action given the broad interest in this case. We do not typically comment on enforcement actions we take against individual accounts, for their privacy,” Twitter continued.
Twitter said it will “take action” if Jones or Infowars seeks to circumvent their ban.
The ban deprives Jones and Infowars of its 1.5 million followers, combined, and comes on top of bans that cut them off from millions of others.
Last month, tech giants YouTube, its parent company Google, Facebook, and Apple deleted or restricted Jones’ accounts, citing Jones’ violations of their policies against hate speech and incitement to violence against minorities.
Twitter executives previously tried to oust Jones and white nationalist Richard Spencer from the platform, Wall Street Journal reported this week, but CEO Jack Dorsey had personally intervened. (Twitter denied the report, saying it was “completely and totally false”.)
By Kelly Weill, Maxwell Tani ,09.06.18
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