On Tuesday, Twitter made the completely predictable move of suspending Alex Jones on the social-media platform for seven days. A day later, Twitter suspended Jones’ InfoWars account as well. Jones and InfoWars may not post any new tweets or retweet anything during that time. Jones may still read tweets and send direct messages to followers, for now. The move came two weeks after tech giants Apple, Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify banned Jones from their sites permanently. Jones has been besieged in the last two weeks as the mainstream media and the Democrat Party have been pressuring tech companies to remove him from social media.
Twitter may be caving to that constant pressure. Or maybe CEO Jack Dorsey just wanted a news cycle to himself in which the mainstream media fawn over him and call him courageous. Dorsey made the rounds on Wednesday, doing interviews with The Hill, NBC News, and the Washington Post. Whatever the case, a permanent ban is likely coming. The move is similar to Facebook’s initial 30-day suspension, which then became a permanent ban.
On Wednesday, Dorsey claimed that the suspension was some kind of teaching tool for Jones. “We’re always trying to cultivate more of a learning mindset and help guide people back toward healthier behaviors and healthier public conversation,” the 41-year-old Dorsey declared.
Dorsey claimed he was not involved with the decision to suspend Jones, saying he found out about it from a text from Twitter lead counsel Vijaya Gadde.
The offending tweet that got Jones removed was a link to a Periscope Live (Twitter’s live streaming app) broadcast, during which Jones urged listeners to keep their “battle rifles and everything ready at their bedsides.” Twitter claimed that the tweet violated their rules and was an incitement to violence.
“We were getting a number of reports around the tweet and the Periscope that the content was inciting violence, which is against our terms of service, and we took action,” Dorsey said. “There’s a number of actions that we believe help a call to incitement to violence. And those are the things we need to make sure we’re taking action on.”
Jones appears to have known the suspension was coming. Prior to Tuesday’s Twitter suspension, Jones and InfoWars had been directing listeners to Tumblr, a Verizon-owned social-media platform. Jones and InfoWars had been inactive on Tumblr for almost a year until this week. Jones’ time on Tumblr may be short too, as the company reports that it is “closely monitoring the situation.”
Prior to the Twitter suspension, the InfoWars account tweeted, “They can take our Facebook, Apple, Tunein, YouTube, Stitcher, Pinterest, Linkedin, Flickr, Vimeo, Sprout, Mailchimp and Disqus but they’ll never take our…….Tumblr!” The tweet also contained a link to Jones’ Tumblr account.
Jones addressed the situation in a tweet on his InfoWars account on Wednesday. “I did not threaten the MSM with battle rifles! The NYT wants me off Twitter! The story is a hoax!” Then, as if Jones is actually asking for a permanent ban, he said, “This is total war! You should reach out at Jack! We should start boycotting democrat companies!” Later on Wednesday, the InfoWars account was suspended for one week as well.
Sometimes it’s hard to feel sorry for Alex Jones, because he seems to bring so much of this negative attention upon himself. His over-the-top personality, click-baiting headlines, and his constant marketing of his supplements and survival gear take away from his more thoughtful and insightful takes on the world around us. But Jones, like him or not, does have something to say — a lot of good things. He does champion freedom and the Constitution. He does point out the globalists and their one-world agenda. As with all people, we must take his bad with his good. We need to stand behind his right to be heard.
The current war against Jones brings Orwell to mind yet again. It’s funny how the book 1984 seems to be coming alive these days. Jones is currently on the receiving end of the mainstream media and Silicon Valley’s version of Two Minutes of Hate. They are attempting to end his career of with their voluminous, overbearing noise; no facts needed. And maybe they’re succeeding. Jones is being “un-personed” by the media and Silicon Valley. If it can happen to Jones, it can happen to anyone with whom they disagree.
For better or worse, the world has changed the way in which people communicate with one other. People are just as likely to contact others on Facebook or Twitter than to e-mail or call them on the phone. This evolution of communication, which the social networks themselves have brought about, makes Jones’ current plight not only an issue of private companies refusing service to one consumer whom they find objectionable; it makes it a free-speech issue. And since this is still America, the First Amendment still means something.
Image: screenshot from infowars.com
