Shortly after taking over Twitter (now X), Elon Musk announced that his “mission” was to make the platform “by far the most accurate source of information about the world.” Since then, he’s reinstated the accounts of innumerable extremists and conspiracy theorists previously banned from the site, and now he’s welcoming back a true titan of outlandish lies: Alex Jones.
After tweeting a poll Friday asking users whether Jones should be allowed back on Twitter — a poll that Jones won handedly — Musk wrote Saturday, “The people have spoken and so it shall be,” officially bringing Jones to X.
Jones’ first action Sunday was a retweet of Andrew Tate welcoming him back to the site formerly known as Twitter.
Musk’s decision was prompted by a Tucker Carlson interview with Jones, which streamed on X Thursday evening. (Carlson teased the two-hour conversation by claiming that Jones had predicted 9/11 months before it happened, and that the government decided to “destroy him” afterward.) Jones appealed directly to Musk in his own short video before the interview aired. “Elon Musk says he’s a free speech absolutist, but still hasn’t let me back on Twitter with my own channel,” Jones said in the clip. “I hope Elon will watch this interview and actually hear, from me, why I was really banned on Twitter before he bought it — not for the false reasons he’s given.”
“I will hear him out,” Musk replied to an X user who shared Jones’ message, and told another that he would consider lifting the suspension, as the site “aspires to be the global town square” and “permanent bans should be extremely rare.” He also appeared to run a poll on the matter that was only visible to paid, premium accounts, and responded to a public one in which voters overwhelmingly supported the idea of Jones returning to the platform. “I guess a lot of people want him unbanned,” Musk tweeted.
Just over a year ago, Musk had dismissed the very prospect of Jones getting his account back, indicating that he couldn’t forgive the InfoWars host’s defamatory falsehoods about the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting being a hoax or “false flag.” (Successful lawsuits against Jones over these repeated comments, which led to harassment of the victims’ families, resulted in a total of $1.48 billion in legal judgments.) Musk at the time tweeted that because his firstborn son died as an infant, he had “no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame.”
But Musk seemed to drop this reasoning ahead of Jones’ appearance on Carlson’s X show, commenting that Twitter’s justification for booting him off the site in September 2018 was “not a valid reason for suspension.”
At that point, Jones had already had his accounts and content removed from most other platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, Apple, Spotify, LinkedIn, and even Pinterest, for violating various rules against harassment and hate speech. Twitter suspended Jones for a week that August for incitements to violence, and made the ban permanent the next month over a Periscope stream on the InfoWars account in which Jones ranted at CNN journalist Oliver Darcy for 10 minutes in a Capitol Hill hallway. During the confrontation, Jones said that Darcy resembled “a possum that crawled out of the rear end of a dead cow. That’s what you look like. You look like a possum that got caught doing some really nasty stuff — in my view.” Twitter’s moderation team said Jones had violated their guidelines against abusive behavior.
But on Thursday, Jones’ supporters downplayed this incident, arguing that he had been exiled for a mere insult as opposed to an in-person, live-streamed tirade targeting a journalist at work. Musk was evidently convinced.
Jones’ return may win Musk some cred with far-right fans of paranoid nonsense, but it’s unlikely to curry any favor with advertisers, who have abandoned X in droves of late due to Musk’s endorsement of antisemitic conspiracy theories and a surge in hateful extremism on the site. Last month, speaking at a conference in New York, he accused those brands of trying to “blackmail” him and told them, “Go fuck yourselves.” Re-platforming Jones will surely be seen in the corporate world as another sign of impulsive, reckless management and an appetite for self-destruction.
Or, to put it another way: by bringing Jones back into the fold, Musk has tied his fortunes to the one man who might be a bigger liability than him.