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.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/twitter-users-vote-elon-musk-quit-ceo-poll-rcna62332
A year ago next Monday, Musk asked “Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll”. The votes came in, 57.5% to resign, 42.5% to stay. If you’re wondering how much he care about polls where he hasn’t pre-ordained the outcome.
This asshole always uses a poll as a cover when he does something shitty. “I want nazi’s back on the site but it will be unpopular… better poll my alt-right nazi fans! Heh, heh. I’m so clever.”
Smells like desperation 😤
Xcho chamber
If you’re still on Twitter, you’re a fascist sympathizer, full stop.
Um idk about this blanket statement
Ehhh Twitter has been pretty friendly to anti-democracy types for years now. January 6th was literally organized on the app and that was way before Musk. At this point I have an extremely hard time believing any regular Tweeter who claims ignorance.
Some people are just oblivious. Take my dad, for instance. He told me last week “so Twitter is now called ‘X’!” Uh, yeah, thanks.
But he’s probably not on twitter since it also changed its look.
He is, he uses it every day. For some reason he assumed I hadn’t heard of it which I guess makes sense as I deleted my acct and don’t use it at all, but I mean, it was all over tech news for a couple months.
Personally I only have an account still because it’s the way I log into Disqus and I don’t remember my actual Disqus password. I don’t actually go on X/Twitter unless linked to by a post or something, and even then I’m usually not logged in because I don’t have the app on my phone, and I do lemmy browsing on phone.
Is password recovery not working?
Well I’m guess am a fascist now, thank you for the heads-up
“Let’s see, how can I make it even shittier…?” -Elon
Next, he should hire Andrew Tate for a management position
Is that guy out of Romanian prison yet?
I believe he’s been under home detention for a while.
Good, now advertisers have even less reason to spend money on that platform
I see we’re still reporting on X as if it retained any kind of importance or significance. Quaint.
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:
- Satellite internet
- Low Earth orbit launches
- Electric vehicle charging infrastructure
- Social media
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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
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.
After buying the platform in October 2022, tech billionaire Musk rejected calls from some of Jones’s supporters to reinstate his account.
After Musk posted the poll, Jones shared a video online in which he called on his supporters to vote in favour of his ban being overturned.
Responding to one user on Saturday, Musk said he “vehemently” disagreed with Jones’s statements about Sandy Hook, adding: “but are we a platform that believes in freedom of speech or are we not?”
Last month he accused major advertisers of trying to “blackmail” him when they boycotted X over concerns about antisemitic content shared on the site - including a post by Musk himself, which he later apologised for.
The original article contains 390 words, the summary contains 178 words. Saved 54%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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