Liberals on X/Twitter may be grabbing their preferred pronouns and heading for the exits at X in even greater numbers, now that Elon Musk has reinstated Alex Jones, the wildly unpredictable owner of the Infowars website.
Jones, when told of the news, said he had been banned for so long, he wasn’t even sure how to get back on X. The previous owner team of X/Twitter, under Jack Dorsey, permanently banned Jones in 2018, calling him a right-wing conspiracy theorist and accusing him of “abusive behavior.”
Back then, Twitter said Jones posted a video violating Twitter’s policy against “abusive behavior.” The video showed Jones berating CNN journalist Oliver Darcy for several minutes in between two congressional hearings on social media and its bias against conservative users. Dorsey had testified at both hearings.
Here is the 2018 video that was the final straw for “old” Twitter, which prompted the banishment of Jones:
Dorsey punished not only Jones, but said he would take action against any account that was even potentially associated with Jones or Infowars.
At the time that Twitter banned Jones, he had some 900,000 followers; Infowars had about 430,000. Today, even though his account had been frozen for five years, Jones has 946.9K followers. Last week, Musk ran a survey asking X users if they wanted Jones reinstated and approximately 70% of those who responded were in favor. By Sunday morning, Musk posted on his account, “The people have spoken and so it shall be.”
Jones declared bankruptcy recently after a court ordered that he must pay $1.1 billion in defamation damages stemming from his claims about the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting. A bankruptcy judge has since said he will have to pay that personally, and that his bankruptcy declaration won’t protect him. Courts in both Connecticut and Texas ruled that Jones intentionally defamed relatives of the children killed in the shooting when he accused them of being actors in a hoax.
The following video is classic Alex Jones, posted just before he was banned by Dorsey in 2018, where he rants about the globalist agenda. In it, he talks about how the federal government was conspiring with the media, which in 2023 is the subject of congressional hearings. It is the also type of discourse that had mainstream media calling Jones a conspiracy theorist:
Musk’s X platform has taken financial hits for providing a free speech rodeo, complete with skilled riders, political steer wrestlers, bucking broncos, cheering sections, rodeo queens, and commentary clowns, all provided as news and entertainment that has few sideboards. And X is also used by those who only follow nonpolitical accounts, such as sports, arts, books, and science. Many X users are not using the platform for debate, but for cooking tips and weather reports.
Musk has chosen to push back against the threats of advertisers against the platform, including the likes of Disney and Walmart, which have pulled their ads from X and moved their promotion money to Chinese-owned TikTok and to the Meta universe, which owns Facebook and Instagram. Musk responded to that threat by telling any advertiser who wanted to try to blackmail him with ad dollars to “Go f*ck yourself.”
One year ago, just after Musk took over majority ownership, X had 368 million monthly users. As of October, 2023, X has approximately 556 million active monthly users, and receives 6.14 billion visits per month.
But liberals, including PBS/NPR, have been fleeing the platform for a smattering of alternatives, such as Threads, owned by leftwing propagandist Mark Zuckerberg, and Blue Sky, which looks very much like X, which is majority owned by Jack Dorsey. Mainstream media outlets have been publishing a slew of news stories about alternatives to X in an attempt to drain users from the X platform. Mastodon, started by a Russian-born programmer, is favored by liberal U.S. journalists.
