For those who don’t know who Alex Jones is, he is the shouty, red face of American conspiracy theory with a particular love of ranting about the Deep State despite it being completely obvious that no one is secretly running anything.
As horrifying as his assertions can be – the guy especially loves plugging the idea that every school shooting are “false flag” operations staged by “crisis actors” – Jones’ fake news peddling is generally about as harmless as an old man yelling at you to get off his lawn.
After years of putting up with ridiculous conspiracy theories, lies, and right-wing rhetoric, a number of prominent platforms such as Apple, Google, and YouTube have started to finally ban Jones and his “content” over the past week.
However, Twitter remains one of the very few platforms that haven’t banned Jones, and the lousy explanation from the company’s CEO Jack Dorsey is that the conspiracy theorist technically has not broken any rules.
We didn’t suspend Alex Jones or Infowars yesterday. We know that’s hard for many but the reason is simple: he hasn’t violated our rules. We’ll enforce if he does. And we’ll continue to promote a healthy conversational environment by ensuring tweets aren’t artificially amplified.
— jack ??? (@jack) August 8, 2018
This was almost disproven immediately when several users dug up some of Jones’ old tweets, causing Twitter to begrudgingly issue out a statement confirming that the guy had, in fact, broken the rules. Rather than take this second chance at fixing its mistake, Twitter decided to double down on its original decision by continuing to allow Jones to lurk around on he platform.
Apparently someone can get a warning for violating Twitter’s rules for tweeting support for transgender people (I’ve actually seen this happen), but Jones’ tweets and videos about the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting being a “hoax” are perfectly fine.
Needless to say, many people aren’t too happy at Dorsey’s dodgy explanation and Twitter’s inconsistent enforcement of its rules, and have decided to strike them where it will hurt the most: their wallets.
In protest of Twitter’s dumbassery, users have started blocking every Fortune 500 company with a Twitter account, essentially boycotting several of the platform’s high-profile advertisers.
Cutting Twitter off at its wallet with a mass boycott is certainly a unique way of protesting the platform and it certainly struck a chord with users as thousands have already joined in on bringing down the massive ban hammer.
.@shannoncoulter has an idea. And a point:
If @jack refuses to honor @Twitter’s own Terms, that all of us are required to follow except for Alex Jones, why should its users remain a commodity to sell advertising? We are Twitter’s most valuable asset and he’s alienated all of us. https://t.co/6043uWyY2f
— Sleeping Giants (@slpng_giants) August 12, 2018
The mass blocking of Fortune 500 companies will stop once Twitter bans Alex Jones, which based on the platform’s weird decision-making could happen either tomorrow or never.
We’ll just have to see how this whole dumb saga plays out. In the meantime, here’s some advice, Twitter: dig UPWARDS.