The conspiracy theorist was banned from Twitter - now X - but its owner has now reinstated him.

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.

  • loki_d20@lemmy.world
    27·
    1 year ago

    What a ridiculous idea. People rely on Twitter for their job and aren’t interacting with the politics of social media. They’re sympathizers for daring to have a job that involves being seen on social media. Regardless of your view of Twitter, people aren’t leaving Twitter and that means their customers are still reliant on it for a source of info on many content providers.

          • noahm@lemmy.world
            18·
            1 year ago

            They don’t want this! Control comes with responsibility and is expensive. Twitter is already there, has been there for a long time, and still has the users and the mindshare. It’s still the logical choice for organizations wanting to reach the widest audience.

            Fortunately that last bit does seem to be changing. It’s not happening as fast as many of us think it should, some prominent organizations have left X. Hopefully more will continue to do that, but calling the stragglers fascists, as was done earlier in this thread, is not a productive way to engage.

            • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
              8·
              1 year ago

              Lemmy.world, one of the largest instances said it costs around $1500 per month and about $200 to set up, I don’t think it’s expensive. If all of one state’s government puts it on Mastodon, then everyone under that can post as well under that umbrella. This isn’t a huge deal or groundbreaking.

            • takeda@lemmy.world
              2·
              1 year ago

              The responsibility only matters if their server is open, they could have one just for their employees like it is done with email.

              But there is another option and it only requires web server which they already have. It is called RSS feed.

          • rbesfe@lemmy.ca
            1·
            1 year ago

            Yeah good luck getting the average transit user to figure out and use mastodon

            • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
              1·
              1 year ago

              You don’t have to sign up, just have a link from your website like they do twitter. Not sure why you guys are trying to find the negative. This one is a no-brainer.

      • cokeslutgarbage@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 year ago

        I dont have Twitter or children, but I know some school districts exclusively use Twitter to announce school closings or delays from weather. To play devil’s advocate towards myself, parents could just listen to the radio or watch their local news, both of which usually/used to have school closings listed.

        I don’t have an opinion abt this, I just have friends that are still on Twitter because they follow their kid’s schools.

      • loki_d20@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 year ago

        Any job where you have to sell your image or show your work to get sales. Such as artists, news sites not part of MSM, and content creators. While there are various sites, none of them work as well as Twitter at sharing info and getting your info in front of new users.

    • TBi@lemmy.world
      10·
      1 year ago

      If you are still on by choice then I’d agree with the OP. If you need it for work then that’s different, but you should be trying to move off it.