While major social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube and tech giants like Apple shun conspiracy theorist and hate monger Alex Jones, Twitter has stood out in the tech sector by keeping him. Tonight, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey defended his company’s decision to leave Jones’s Twitter accounts alone.
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
Dorsey continues:
“Truth is we’ve been terrible at explaining our decisions in the past. We’re fixing that. We’re going to hold Jones to the same standard we hold to every account, not taking one-off actions to make us feel good in the short term, and adding fuel to new conspiracy theories. If we succumb and simply react to outside pressure, rather than straightforward principles we enforce (and evolve) impartially regardless of political viewpoints, we become a service that’s constructed by our personal views that can swing in any direction. That’s not us.”
“Last year we expanded hateful conduct and media policies to include abusive usernames and hateful imagery. We also updated rules around violence and physical harm to include the glorification of violence and violent extremist groups.”
- violent threats
- wishing for the physical harm or death of individuals or groups
- references to mass murder, violent events, or specific acts of violence in which such groups have been the primary targets or victims
- behavior that incites fear about a protected group
- repeated and/or nonconsensual slurs, epithets, racist and sexist tropes, or other content that degrades someone
These are the standards by which Twitter is weighing the content shared by Alex Jones and InfoWars. Apparently, Jones’s pages, podcasts, and videos have crossed the “hate speech” line for Dorsey’s competitors but not for Twitter.
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